Sexism in languages

Heng Ding

In my process of acquiring French, one of the most difficult things I find is trying to remember masculine or feminine French words. Like many other languages, French is gendered: pronouns, verbs, nouns and adjectives reflect the gender of the object or the person they refer to.

In French, there is not a word like “they” that is gender neutral. Most critically, the masculine is always given priority over the feminine. For instance, a French speaker would still use the masculine plural, ils, to refer to a group that consists of even 1 man and 10 women (although some people mentioned that it has changed a bit, still that’s how we learned in the francisation course here in Quebec). However, although in the past some words that have only masculine lexemes, such as “professeur” (teacher) and “avocat” (lawyer), are additionally preceded by “femme” if one wants to refer to a woman, now things are changed. For example, under the new rules, professions such as doctors, teachers and professors will now have female-only names in the official dictionary published by the Académie Française. For example, the term “doctor” is currently used for both men and women, while the word “doctor” will be added to the feminine suffix and become “docteur. However, the French Academy, which has an overwhelmingly male membership, has fiercely opposed the feminization of professional titles, saying it would bring “exponential complexity” and even “fatal disaster” to the French language.

Not only French, but my mother language, Chinese, also contains many sexist words that discriminate women group. For example, there is a famous Chinese saying “男人四十一枝花,女人四十豆腐渣”, which means after men reach the age of 40, they will become more attractive and more appreciative while women reach the age of 40, just like tofu dregs, worthless and no nutrition, will not attract others. This is a very insulting saying and devalues women, but few people would associate it with sexism and most of them just use it without scruples.

Sexist language has been defined as “words, phrases, and expressions that unnecessarily differentiate between women and men or exclude, trivialize, or diminish either gender” (Parks & Roberton, 1998a, p. 455). Most of the sexist languages, from my understanding, are demeaning and discriminatory towards women. Although the status of women has increased dramatically, they are still in a disadvantaged position and are still a vulnerable group.

Language always changes with the social, political, cultural and other developments of the time. Sexism in language needs to be taken seriously and a more neutral approach needs to be thought of. We need to raise women’s awareness through the study of linguistic sexism so that women will not be the victims of linguistic discrimination. Hopefully, we could develop a more gender-inclusive language and encourage people to use it in the future.

The Bonjour-Hi controversy

Catherine Shieh

As a language teacher, I like the idea of hearing more languages being spoken everywhere. It translates to a persons’ full linguistic repertoire being used and honoured. However, in Quebec, the act of greeting people in more than one language has become a controversy. It is so well known that Saturday Night Live even made a skit about it.   

According to Van Herk (2018), code switching is a common phenomenon. It is a linguistic resource many communities use to signal a bi-cultural identity. Montreal being in a French province within an English dominant country, complicates the situation. As stipulated by the Charter of the French Language, all workers must carry their activities in French. However, many retail and business workers use the expression Bonjour-Hi, to indicate their fluency in both languages and to provide courteous customer service.

In October 2019, the Quebec government expressed his will to eliminate the bilingual expression Bonjour-Hi in businesses and government services. This statement came after the Office Québécois de la langue française (OQLF), who oversees the preservation of French, revealed that greetings in French dropped from 84 to 75% between 2010 and 2017.  Thus, Simon Jolin-Barette, the minister responsible for the French language, sees this as evidence that the official language of the province is under threat.  

Following Jolin-Barette’s announcement, the Bloc Québécois posted an advertisement on Twitter promoting the alternative expression “Bonjour-HO”. This holiday campaign aims at stamping out the bilingual greeting Bonjour-Hi. However, many people on social media pointed out the that the phrase might not be appropriate because the word “ho” carries a markedly different meaning than Santa Claus’s ho-ho-ho.

In my opinion, the expression Bonjour-Hi is what makes the city of Montreal unique. This greeting should be kept in the same way because it promotes inclusivity and respect for both languages. Our province’s financial resource should not be allocated to separate the anglophones and the francophones any further. Policies should also focus on expanding and not reducing people’s linguistic repertoire. That said, what are your thoughts on the proposed banning of Bonjour-Hi?

References

Gouvernement du Québec. (n.d.). Office québécois de la Langue Française. Accueil – Office québécois de la langue française. Retrieved October 27, 2022, from https://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/accueil.aspx

Québécois, B. (2020, December 13). Avec la campagne “2021. Twitter. Retrieved October 27, 2022, from https://twitter.com/BlocQuebecois/status/1337915163090030596?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1337915163090030596%7Ctwgr%5Ecdecb1b29c9448fb27db955ae6e0d4e1f375c097%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.timeout.com%2Fmontreal%2Fnews%2Fheres-how-montrealers-are-reacting-to-replacing-bonjour-hi-with-bonjour-ho-121420

Sandler, G. (2022, January 12). SNL did a skit about Montreal last night & it was brutal. MTL Blog. Retrieved October 27, 2022, from https://www.mtlblog.com/montreal/snl-did-a-skit-about-montreal-it-was-brutal

Van Herk, Gerard. (2018). What is sociolinguistics? 2e Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-      Blackwell.

Does Bilingual Music Threaten the Future Of The French Language & Culture?

Catherine Shieh

            The French language Hip-Hop genre has undergone one of the most interesting and complex transformations amongst other genres of music in the past few decades. In Montreal, the rap scene reflects the city’s location within North America (predominantly English) and inside the province of Quebec (dominated by French), as well as other diverse immigrant communities. Sarkar and Allen studied the multilingual code-switching in Quebec rap and cited in an interview:

“Montreal style… is the only place where you have a cultural mix like that, whether it’s English, [Haitian] Creole, then French, but all the same as Quebec French” (2007).

The mixture of language in the music industry has contributed to the rise of a new unique subculture known as Franglais (French + English) and the French traditionalists of Montreal are afraid the bilingual nature of these songs and its ideologies could threaten the future of the French language and culture within the province.

            Among the bilingual rappers of this generation are Loud, FouKi and the Dead Obies.  They have received backlash from columnists such as Mathieu Bock-Coté from Le Journal de Montréal who says, “Franglais is a slippery slope toward Anglicization. These bourgeois-bohemian adolescents who think speaking English or Franglais will make Montreal into a New York are deluded because it is the French language that gives the city its cachet” (Soupcoff, 2020). Bilingual artists rapping in Franglais are known to face serious political and social challenges. Quebec’s music industry is heavily subsidized by the Provincial government, but only if artists and record companies are producing music in French. Some groups have lost subsidies from the Provincial government for Francophone artists because it did not reach at least 70% of its lyrics in French. Many rising artists severely depend on these types of grants and need to carefully ensure they meet the French word count requirements in their song. For the sake of language and cultural preservation, bilingual rappers are constantly rejected and are treated unfairly by Commercial French radio stations.

            For bilingual artists, rapping in multiple languages allows for more creativity. In terms of rhymes, it opens the world to more lyrical possibilities and a better rhythmic flow. In my opinion, Montreal being one of the biggest multicultural cities of our country, the music should reflect the state of our modern cultural evolution and space. Sadly, the music industry is still dominated by cultural elites, that are white Francophone artists, and they will continue to suppress the rise of this subculture. Music has long been used by many as a tool to expose social injustices. By restricting and limiting an artist’s freedom to express as they desire, are we preventing the evolution of sociocultural growth?

References

Hornberger, N. H., & McKay, S. (2010). Sociolinguistics and language education. Multilingual Matters.

Sarkar, M. and Allen, D. (2007) Hybrid identities in Quebec hip-hop: Language, territory, and ethnicity in the mix. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 6 (2), 117–130.

Soupcoff, M. (2020). Marni Soupcoff: What’s worse – unilingual labelling or contracting … National Post. Retrieved September 22, 2022, from https://nationalpost.com/opinion/marni-soupcoff-whats-worse-unilingual-labelling-or-contracting-covid-19

Van Herk, G. (2018). What is sociolinguistics? 2e Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A Special Case of Language Anxiety?

By Wai In Chan

In one of our last classes, Lauren Godfrey-Smith gave an amazing lecture on language anxiety and the experiences of people who went through language anxiety. It was a really emotional experience for me because I felt that the study was acknowledging and validating my feelings about speaking and learning French in Montreal. Over 25 years of my life I have been learning French as a second language in English as a first language schools, and I STILL feel so much anxiety using the language that I avoid it at all costs even until today.

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Grammatical Gender in French

Yu-Ting, Liu

“What if I used a masculine word when I speak in French, what would people think about me?” That was a question I asked my roommate, a francophone Quebecois. She laughed and then replied: “people are going to think you’re not good in French, that’s all.”

As a French language beginner, I have some questions about grammatical gender and pronoun in French language. In my first language, Chinese, there is no grammatical gender. Gender only needs to be specified in written form, such as 他 (he) and 她 (she), but both of them pronounce in the same way “ta”. Therefore, Chinese speakers never have to think about “gender” when they speak, and certainly there is no verb conjugation either! You will find that some Chinese speakers still have the problem when starting a sentence with “he” or “she” in conversations. (At least I do!) However, later when I started to learn English and Korean, there is no grammatical gender rules either. Thus, I was oblivious of this issue until this September I began to learn French.

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No French in English class!

Miss Education says:

As an undergrad studying to become an ESL teacher, I was constantly told that there was no room for French in English class (except if there was a severe problem that needed to be addressed). Five years after finishing my bachelor’s degree, I have had the opportunity to work with other ESL teachers and discuss about this issue. Some teachers did not use French at all, while others found it difficult not to speak it during their teaching. Clearly, ESL specialist go about this in different ways. What we largely have in common, though, is that we believe there should be very minimal to no use of the students’ L1 in the L2 classroom. This suggests that ESL teachers believe that the best way to learn an L2 is to be fully soaking in a tub of the second language in question.

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