My French or Yours?

Your child wants to be the Canadian prime minister one day? 

Teach her French now. No French, no Ottawa.

It’s funny when kids fight over a toy that is not theirs. “I saw it first. No. I saw it first.” The mother bursts into the room and breaks the fight. She’s trembling because it’s something they should not have seen in the first place. She tells herself, to be more careful.

Canadians fight over French. The country was colonized by both France and England. That’s why French and English are official languages in Ottawa where the federal government sits. Packaged food at the grocery store like this blog photo, also has labels in French and English.

Canadians fight over the quality of these languages. Example. A co-worker took part time French lessons last fall. The instructor explained the difference between Canadian French and French born and raised on the River Seine, centuries ago. The co-worker happily told her family that the instructor was from France the ‘mother country.’ The daughter-in-law took offense because she grew up speaking French in a Canadian province.

It’s the same language French, but spoken differently in Manitoba and Quebec. They are both Canadian provinces but Quebec believes it has a prior claim to its authenticity because it’s where the French landed, during the fur trade. Quebec is so uniquely French, it has a long history of threatening to break away from Canada and become a country on its own.

Manitoba French or Quebec French? What aggravates matters are African immigrants. They come with language superiority they inherited from colonial masters. Some of them attended elite schools like the famed Sorbonne University. Looking down upon French spoken in either Quebec or provinces like Manitoba defeats the purpose of coming to a new country, to establish a new identity.

It also provides amusement for France the country, because it’s two Canadian camps fighting for something that is not theirs.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.