44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 14, 2022 10:00AM
- Jun/14/22 10:02:58 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the Anishinabek Nation Governance Agreement.
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- Jun/14/22 10:03:47 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8)(a), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to five petitions. These will be tabled in an electronic format.
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- Jun/14/22 2:07:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, languages are at the core of who we are. They are the means through which we express ourselves and our culture, share stories and pass on knowledge throughout the generations. Languages are at the heart of our cultural identity and integral to our collective well-being. Since colonization, hundred of indigenous languages and dialects in Canada have been lost. According to UNESCO, 75% of the remaining 17 indigenous languages in Canada are endangered.
As we mark National Indigenous History Month, I want to thank the elders, knowledge keepers and teachers of indigenous languages. I want to honour the resilience of those who persevered to maintain these precious languages. As we continue to march toward reconciliation, I want to highlight the work of the recently appointed Commissioner of Indigenous Languages, Ronald Ignace, who is here in Ottawa today.
Let us work together to support indigenous people's right to self-determination and the right to maintain, reclaim and revitalize their languages as a fundamental tenet of reconciliation.
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Mr. Speaker, the Bloc Québécois welcomes Senator Mobina Jaffer's Bill S-214, entitled an act to establish international mother language day.
In November 1999, the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization proclaimed International Mother Language Day. The United Nations General Assembly called on its member states to encourage the preservation and protection of the languages spoken by the peoples of the world.
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said, and I quote:
A language is a monument that is just as important as a stone monument, if not more so. Each culture represents a repository of considerable human wealth. Each people has its own repository of beliefs and institutions that represent an irreplaceable experience for humanity as a whole.
This is in keeping with the Bloc Québécois' historic commitment to defending and promoting the French language in Quebec, Canada and America, which in turn is in keeping with the fight for cultural and linguistic diversity in the world and people's right to self-determination.
We know that the right of peoples to ensure the survival and vitality of their language and culture is part of their fundamental right to self-determination. Under the United Nations charter, every people has the right to self-determination, whether they are Scottish, Catalan, Palestinian, Kabyle or Québécois.
With neo-liberal globalization, the entire world is experiencing the commodification and anglicization of culture. U.S. mass culture is steamrolling national cultures.
It is therefore important that we ask ourselves whether we want globalization in a form that makes all national cultures and languages uniform, or one that ensures mutual respect among peoples. I believe that the latter path is the only one that can result in a peaceful and progressive solution that fosters world peace.
It is estimated that half of the 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today will disappear by the end of the century. Biodiversity loss does not just affect nature and wildlife. It also affects the world's linguistic heritage, which is in serious jeopardy.
We are seeing it here. Indigenous languages are at serious risk of disappearing, and the status of French in Canada shows that it is in decline. For example, only 2.4% of francophones outside Quebec speak French at home. French is critically endangered.
Language laws exist all over the world. In the study of various language planning models, they are grouped into two broad categories: models based on the principle of territoriality of collective rights and models based on the principle of personality, of individual choice of languages in a given territory.
Wherever personality models are used, the result is the assimilation of minority languages, because the free choice of languages always favours the majority languages. Moreover, virtually all scholars around the world agree that territoriality is the only approach that allows for the protection of minority languages.
Bill 101 is based on territoriality. We know that the Quebec model, with its Charter of the French Language, aims to make French the only official and common language on Quebec territory.
This is one of the Quebec government's main demands. We are discussing it here in the context of modernizing the Official Languages Act. We want Quebec to be the master of language policy on its territory, while respecting the historical English-speaking minority and recognizing the right of first nations to maintain and develop their original languages and cultures.
In 1977, Camille Laurin made the following statement:
By proclaiming French as Quebec's official language and by recognizing the right of all Quebeckers to use French in all facets of their lives, we are making our language a national public asset, an asset belonging to all Quebeckers, the best way to unite us all and promote dialogue among Quebeckers of different origins. We are giving Quebeckers a way to express their identity to the world.
People who champion French in Quebec have always sought to include newcomers. It comes down to math. If we do not help newcomers learn French, we cannot ensure the survival of the language. Helping newcomers learn French and including them in Quebec society is how we achieve social cohesion. If we want to understand one another, we have to be able to speak the same language.
This is a highly relevant issue right now. Canada's Official Languages Act was, in a way, a response to the 1867 Constitution, which gave rise to language laws that prohibited people from teaching French and banned French schools and the use of French in the governments of nearly every province that now has an anglophone majority.
Then there was an uprising. The Estates General of French Canada were held, and André Laurendeau came along demanding collective rights for Quebec. In the end, the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission fell well short of that goal. It gave us an Official Languages Act that only sought to apply the personality principle, an institutional bilingualism that tried to promote the free choice of French or English in federal institutions where numbers warranted. Outside Quebec, numbers often did not warrant it. The way this was applied has meant that in every census since 1969, the year the Official Languages Act came into force, there has been an increase in the assimilation of francophones outside Quebec.
In Quebec itself, French is now in steep decline. As we know, the proportion of Quebeckers with French as their mother tongue is decreasing. In 1996, 81.5% of the Quebec population had French as their mother tongue. In 2016, it was 78%. Statistics Canada predicts that by 2036, which is only 15 years from now, that figure will be between 70% and 75%. As for the language used at home, it is the same thing: It will drop to around 75% or 76%. The common language, the public language, is an indicator that depends on the language used at home, the mother tongue.
We know that language transfers largely happen towards English, even in Quebec. That is why the Government of Quebec has asked for French to be recognized as the only minority official language. We need the federal government to stop always promoting English as an official language in Quebec, because it leads to the anglicization of newcomers.
Allow me to quote Pierre Bourgault, a great defender of the French language and one of the founders of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale, or RIN: “To fight for French in Quebec is to fight for all the languages of the world against the hegemony of one.”
I think it is vital to fight for French if we want to maintain linguistic diversity in North America.
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Madam Speaker, a few years ago, I read a National Geographic article about endangered languages. I do not remember the names of the specific languages, but I know there was one in Russia, one in India and a series of them in Mexico.
This article not only gave a voice to some of the people who still speak these languages, but it also illustrated the richness of these languages and the difference they make in people's world views.
A language is a way to describe the world, after all. The more ways there are to describe our world, the more accurate picture we will have of that world and its features. An international mother language day would allow us to highlight those features, take time to acknowledge them, love them and promote them.
I want to tell my colleague from Cloverdale—Langley City, whom I hope is still listening, that the Bloc will be supporting Bill S-214.
My speech in support of Bill S-214 will provide a brief history of the idea of mother language day and some statistics. I will also spend a few moments on the mother tongue aspect of languages and give some examples of the richness of different languages.
UNESCO has been observing International Mother Language Day since 1999, when it was adopted unanimously. When this day was added to the calendar, UNESCO noted that 43% of the languages spoken today are at risk of disappearing. In fact, one language disappears every other week on average. It is alarming. That is what will happen now and in the future if nothing is done to preserve and promote the languages. That does not even include all those that have already disappeared over time.
In 2007, the UN General Assembly asked its members to encourage the preservation and protection of all the languages spoken by all peoples in this world. At the time, many languages had already disappeared and many others were disappearing. Why does this happen?
There were events that took place in the past. Civil wars between nations and colonization are two examples of history and its impact, which weakened several languages and made them disappear. We have to acknowledge that and be able to look to the future, make things right and move forward. We have to be able to recognize the mistakes of the past so as not to repeat them.
These days, educational systems, the online world and the belief that English is the only international language of business all contribute to making languages vulnerable. Just a few hundred languages in the world are supported by existing educational systems, and even fewer are supported by the online world and social networks. If you were to go by social networks alone, it would be easy to assume that English is the world's only economic salvation, but people do business in almost every language in the world, not just in English.
When we are conscious of what puts languages in danger of disappearing, we are in a better position to take action, to find solutions and to foster relationships of respect. Mutual respect allows us to see languages as complementary, rather than incompatible or incongruous, ways to talk about and see our world.
Have you ever wondered why we use the expression “mother tongue” instead of “father tongue” or “birth language”? It is simply because the first words children hear are usually spoken by their mother. These words are usually tender and kind, and those sentiments reflect our attachment to our mother tongue.
Like mitochondrial DNA, the mother tongue is passed down from the mother. For example, when French settlers arrived in Quebec, they had several different accents, because France did not, and still does not, have only one nationwide accent. Today, there is the Norman accent, the Parisian accent, the northern accent called the Ch'ti accent, and the southern accent, from the Marseille or Toulouse region. At the time when the first French settlers came to America, it was the same. It was like that then, and it still is today.
How did the distinctive Quebec accent come to be?
Let us talk about one of Quebec's accents, because it is wrong to claim that there is just one. There is the Montreal accent, the Quebec City accent, the Gaspé accent, the Acadian accent, and so on. The first Quebec accent is thought to have come from the filles du roi. They were poor girls or orphans, sometimes belonging to the genteel poor, who were educated at the expense of the French king Louis XIV. The accent we hear today, with words like “moi” and “toi” pronounced like “moé” and “toé”, is the Parisian accent of the 17th century. To those who tell us, even today, that our French is not French, I would say that our French is the legacy of what created French in France and the international French of today. Our expressions are a gateway to history. The same goes for all the world's languages. Some are modern, while others are doors to the past, to nature, and more.
A few years ago, when I was in university, my English second language professor confessed that she adored French. I get that. Even though it was not her mother tongue, she adored it because she found French to be more vivid and precise than English. Take it easy; those were her words. For example, she said that, in English, there is blue, light blue and dark blue, but in French, there is a whole spectrum of blues. She found English interesting because it is a fast language made up of short words. She loved her mother tongue, but she was able to perceive the charms of another language. We should all be like her.
This is true of other languages too. There are words that exist in one language and not another. If I remember correctly, in Inuktitut, there are several dozen words for snow. That makes sense because it was crucial that they be able to describe snow precisely. It was a matter of survival. It helped them find their way. By comparison, in French we have wet snow, loose snow, packed snow, icy snow, slush, powder, and a couple more I have probably forgotten. We do not have that many.
It is only by taking an interest in lesser-known, rarer languages that we can discover the breadth and beauty of the world we live in. Mother tongues should be celebrated. We need to share them, to share the insight that each of them gives us into our world, our emotions, our spirit. The more words a person has, the more precise their vision of the world, both physical and abstract, is. By sharing our languages, by respecting and honouring them, by doing everything possible to protect endangered languages and by allowing these languages to be passed on, we are sharing world views, sharing our visions, and learning to respect one another. As the great Pierre Bourgault said, to protect a language is to protect all languages from the hegemony of one, whatever it may be. A nation can have one, two or three official languages, and individuals can have many more. It is this individual richness that must be preserved and praised.
In conclusion, a language is a system of concepts. It is the basis of every individual and of the construction of the psyche. The more we do to keep the world's languages from disappearing, the more we will enable people to have a strong psyche that is rich in imagery, and the more we will love this diversity. The world's mother tongues are also part of diversity, and we must love them, no matter what they are.
I want to close with this final thought. International mother language day is a bit like Valentine's Day. Lovers love each other all year round, not just on Valentine's Day. We must love our mother tongue all year round, not just on February 21. We have to demonstrate it every day. Still, I do hope we will all celebrate international mother language day together next February 21.
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