Montreal English: Borrowings, but not a dialect

Peggy Curran, THE GAZETTE 

Montreal English: Borrowings, but not a dialect

Bringing words like vernissage into every day English conversation doesn't change the language into a dialect, a researcher finds

James Braithwaite


Maybe Quebec anglos just think we’re distinct.

A funny thing happened when Shana Poplack decided to count the number of French words native English-speakers in Montreal and Quebec City used in ordinary conversations about their lives in la belle province.

Even among the 10 per cent of young people most likely to toss French words into the mix, non-standard English accounted for 0.23 per cent of the words in their interviews.

It was, ironically, a story on language published in The Gazette that got Poplack, a sociolinguist at the University of Ottawa, wondering whether Montreal anglophones really did speak “an English like no other.”

In 1999, Alex Norris, a Gazette reporter who would grow up to become a city councillor with Project Montreal, wrote an award-winning series looking at the new Quebec anglo, those children of Bill 101. In one of his pieces, Norris suggested that contact between the city’s majority and minority languages was transforming Montreal English into a new dialect.

Poplack, who had spent time analyzing the impact of English on the French spoken on the Ottawa-Hull region, decided to see whether those claims stood up to scientific scrutiny. “It is much easier to say something based on perceptions than it is to do the hard, scientific legwork to prove or disprove it,” she said. “The only way to do it is by analyzing all the foreign words and all the other words that were used.”With James Walker at York University and her University of Ottawa colleague Rebecca Malcolmson, and aided by a dozen or more researchers, Poplack decided to see whether the English spoken by anglophones in Montreal and Quebec City was really substantially different from the way people spoke in Oshawa-Whitby, an overwhelmingly English-speaking community east of Toronto.

Participants in the Montreal and Quebec City samples were native English-speakers drawn from the British, Jewish and Italian communities, with candidates identified by age and whether they learned English before or after the adoption of Bill 101.

What they found, with the help of computer databases and word counts, was that the English spoken by your typical Montreal anglo is about as different from the English spoken in Whitby as the regional quirks that might distinguish Ottawa English from the way people talk in Halifax, Calgary or Vancouver.

Which is to say, not so much.

“Our finding was that borrowed words were actually very rare,” said Poplack, who believes their study, published in 2006, is the only scientific study that has looked wasat non-English words in the context of the whole.

“Dépanneur n’t even the most used word,” she said. In fact, she said, the words anglos ‘borrowed’ the most were official words: stage, métro, CEGEP and Québécois.” Not only were differences in vocabulary “infinitesimally tiny,” but Poplack said they were often used “meta-linguistically” – that is, the person speaking was quite aware he or she was borrowing a French word.

Poplack said there’s no reason to get excited about “lexical transfers,” words from French and other languages that find their way into the English vocabulary.

For one thing, she said, vocabulary is always evolving, with each generation adding and subtracting words as the world itself changes, “It’s a continuous process, much as your grandmother might have said icebox and you don’t.”

The researchers also looked at sentence structure and speech patterns used by participants from Montreal, Quebec City and Oshawa-Whitby. Structurally, there was no difference in the way they spoke.

For a language to really change, Poplack said there would have to be mutations in grammar and structure, “the crux of why English is a Germanic language and French is a Romance language.”

One reason Poplack takes issue with the perception that Montreal English – or Quebec French, for that matter – is being absorbed or transformed is because it seems to play into the notion that bilingualism is bad.

“Essentially, borrowings have no impact on the life or vitality of the language. Eighty per cent of designated words in English are of French origin. That was 10 centuries ago. Yet they were integrated into English grammar with English endings and articles and structure. Today, we recognize dép as a French word, but we don’t feel that way about terrace, court, veal, lawyer, mutton,” she said.

“Just bringing words in did not change the language or put it at risk.”