The gravediggers of the French language

Hard, hard day that May 19, 2021 for our poor French language.

Hugo Dumas, the TV columnist for The Press +, celebrated, yesterday, the virtues of a new miniseries of Radio-Canada, The little kings, while others – they are more numerous than one thinks – see Fr English as the future of French in Quebec. Dumas adds with a certain caution that the dialogues of the “little kings”, which he nevertheless considers very realistic, “are not ideal for our French language”.

The six 42-minute episodes of the miniseries are aimed at young people aged 16 to 25. As Rooms in town, once. But make no mistake, the CBC miniseries has nothing to do with Rooms in town, the series by Sylvie Payette which made the heyday of TVA for seven seasons. The only similarity between the two is that the characters who are expected to be high school age five are played by comedians who are 10 years older.

I wonder more and more often if Radio-Canada is not receiving too much money. For five years, the public broadcaster has given birth to new series at the rate where pussies have babies. Even the pandemic does not seem to have started the frenzied pace of births.

A GIFT FROM THE CBC TO OUR MEMBERS

In comparison, the English network is rather poor when it comes to drama series. It must be said that in English Canada, a series costs three to four times more expensive to produce than in Quebec. That is another story that I will come back to. A story whose authors, performers and Quebec artisans are unfortunately paying the price.

The deputies of the National Assembly will not yet have started studying Bill 96 “on the official and common language of Quebec” except through the Extra tou.tv (which must be paid in extra !), Radio-Canada will give them six shows in which the characters speak exactly the language the law intends to protect us from.

It is not for Radio-Canada to do useful work by denouncing what will happen to our language if the trend continues, but rather to shock. As the public broadcaster has the gift of eating at all the racks, he does not deprive himself of it. He is ready to do anything to reach the audience that escapes him, even if it means losing part of what he already has.

STILL AN IMPORT FROM THE USA

I personally know dozens of young people who are the age of the protagonists of the miniseries. Some of those are my grandchildren. With all due respect to Marie-Hélène Lapierre and Justine Phillie, the two screenwriters, none is expressed in the incomprehensible gibberish of Adaboy, Julep or Pom, the narcissistic and lost characters they have invented.

I write “invented” to be nice, because their characters and the general tone of the series are largely inspired by popular series that the American network CW has been making a splash for a few years. As if that weren’t enough to import the extravagance and absurdity of woke culture from the United States.

With characters who speak the abominable language of the “little kings” on public television, with the snobbish elite of the Plateau Mont-Royal who judge avant-garde women who express themselves in the poetic language. nun of the loudmouths of the taverns of yesteryear, with all those who believe that Frenglish is the inevitable evolution of our language, we have more gravediggers than necessary to quickly sing the requiem of French in Quebec .