Of Montréal
Wednesday, 25 November 2009 | 18:10
“I will move the last deux ou trois autres ici.”
Ah, Franglais, aka Frenglish, the language of much of my youth. Kids on the playground at school, calling out to each other in a French-English hybrid, our own personal creole. A sentence that begins in English ends in French, the two official languages of this country merging effortlessly. For these past few days here in Montréal, where virtually everyone is bilingual, I’ve been surrounded by this throwback to my elementary school days. It may seem crude or lazy, but to effectively speak this mélange requires a good grasp of both languages. It’s a choice, a way to better express oneself – as some things are simply better expressed in one or the other language. Sometimes one requires the precision of English, with its enormous vocabulary; so many ways of saying the same thing means a more elegant speech, with nuances that may be lost in other languages. Other times, one prefers the poetry of French, capturing an idea or a feeling in a more abstract way.
It is in cases like these that illustrate that language is a living, evolving thing, more than a collection of letters ensconced in dusty dictionaries. I’ve been working with several people these past few days at a bilingual conference, and when one of us speaks English, the others reply in English; when one speaks in French, the others reply in French. If someone speaks Franglais, others will follow suit, creating their own hybrids, combining words and expressions of different languages like linguistic Lego blocks. And yet, somehow, we all know what we mean. There’s a certain freedom in that.
