{"id":84965,"date":"2023-04-18T12:42:46","date_gmt":"2023-04-18T16:42:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=84965"},"modified":"2024-09-01T09:54:34","modified_gmt":"2024-09-01T13:54:34","slug":"opinion-veena-dwivedi-discusses-development-preservation-of-french","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2023\/04\/opinion-veena-dwivedi-discusses-development-preservation-of-french\/","title":{"rendered":"OPINION: Veena Dwivedi discusses &#8216;Franglais&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<hr \/>\n<p>Brock University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Veena Dwivedi had a piece recently published in the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/opinion\/article-the-futile-fight-against-franglais\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Globe and Mail<\/a><\/em> about factors that impact language use and development amid conversations about preserving French in Quebec.<\/p>\n<p>She writes:<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cAny anglophone Montrealer will tell you that one of the hardest things to do upon leaving our beloved hometown is first, to learn that there are no kisses on any one\u2019s cheek when saying hello, and second, learning to\u00a0not\u00a0switch into French as you speak. I had to stop myself from saying \u201cmerci\u201d to the bus driver while living in the U.S. as a graduate student; and it was a couple of years into teaching my classes here at Brock that one of my teaching assistants from South Korea very politely asked me what \u201ccomme \u04aba\u201d meant. My colleagues here never talk about the \u201csubventions\u201d that they are applying for, whereas my McGill colleagues would regularly talk about grant applications in that way.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Here\u2019s the thing: When two linguistic communities live side-by-side for generations, each community borrows words from the other. A recent social media post made by the Quebec minister responsible for promoting and protecting French, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Roberge, implies that this natural process leads to language extinction. That is, the supposedly humorous\u00a030-second video\u00a0features a peregrine falcon, a species that has been at risk of extinction and for which conservation efforts are under way. The French voice-over describes the bird as \u201csuper quick\u00a0en vol\u201d (in flight) and continues to sprinkle sentences with other borrowed English words like \u201csick,\u201d \u201cchill\u201d and \u201cinsane.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The minister is completely wrong that switching between languages, and\/or borrowing words from one language into another kills the language. It doesn\u2019t kill the language; it changes the language. We tend to equate linguistic systems with writing systems \u2013 while these are related, these are not identical. Language is learned anew by every generation of babies in their communities and every time a baby learns their language, it\u2019s never quite the same as it was in the previous generation. The biggest linguistic innovators, however, are teenagers. Teenagers need to separate from their parental tribe, and they do so very creatively via language to create their own in-group. Again, this is a perfectly normal developmental milestone in language. It can\u2019t be stopped.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Continue reading the full article on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/opinion\/article-the-futile-fight-against-franglais\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Globe and Mail<\/em> website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brock University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Veena Dwivedi had a piece recently published in the Globe and Mail about factors that impact language use and development amid conversations about preserving French in Quebec.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45633,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,6,38],"tags":[522,739,12274,12215,29,3492],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84965"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84965"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85028,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84965\/revisions\/85028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}