Franglais in a post-rap world: audible minorities and anxiety about mixing in Québec

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2014, the release of an album by a Montreal-based hip-hop group whose lyrics systematically combine words and phrases from English and French activated fears among the francophone majority about their future as a national minority. Neo-conservative nationalists responded to the album by criticizing youth for having “massacred” the French language and for giving in to the glamour of American rap music. By recalling Québec’s fragile status as a linguistic minority and its ongoing struggle to defend the French language vis-à-vis the rest of Canada, criticisms drew sharp lines between insiders and outsiders. This text takes inspiration from critical sociolinguistics and recent analyses of race relations in Québec to show that code-switching in popular music can create new opportunities for shared community among young people of diverse backgrounds, but these emerging forms of solidarity do not necessarily translate into belonging in terms of the larger political community.

KEYWORDS:

• Audible minorities
• rap music
• code-switching
• social mixing
• race relations
• Québec

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, whose comments made a significant contribution to overall analysis and argument of this paper. I also received very helpful suggestions from Pierre Anctil and Samuel Victor assisted with some translations. I would especially like to thank Alexis Verville, who was responsible for the analysis of song lyrics and who contributed to the methodological section of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Gagnon and St-Louis (2016) contains several critical readings of the “charter of values” debate.

2. For a comprehensive retrospective on the reasonable accommodations debate and the Bouchard-Taylor Commission that was given the mandate to conduct public consultations on this topic, see Lefebvre (2018).

3. For the purposes of this text I will use the expression “French-Canadian” to refer to the French-speaking majority of primarily European descent, the term “Québec” to refer to the political territory which is a province of Canada, and “Québécois” to refer to individuals or groups who belong to that political territority independent of their ancestry. The usage “French-Canadian” can also apply to French-speaking outside of Québec living elsewhere in Canada.

4. LeBlanc, Boudreault-Fournier, and Djerrahian (2007) explain the difficulty of defining the category of “minority” in contemporary Québec.

5. In this analysis I draw from systems theory (Bateson 1972) in order to shed light on the fact that the focus on French-Canadians’ status as a national minority in linguistic terms can and often does obscure their status as a racial and ethnic majority in the context of Québec. Obviously majority-minority relations play out differently according to the context. A systemic analysis makes is possible to understand what differences “make a difference” according to particular settings and social dynamics (for an example of this systemic analysis for Québec, see White 2017).

6. In the work of John J. Gumperz and his colleagues that has been a source of inspiration for my work, the meticulous analysis of subtle communicative gatekeeping mechanisms between majorities and minorities questioned the belief that the study of interactions at the micro-level are unable to explain larger structural factors that are often at play in the reproduction of inequality and various systemic forms of discrimination (Heller 2013).

7. Language policy was also enacted by the federal government, for example the Official Languages Law in 1969 and Article 23 of the Constitution of 1982, both of which apply to Québec support French language expression.

8. For a good summary of the debates surrounding Law 101, see Cardinal (2011). To read more about these changes from the point of view of immigrants, see Verboczy (2016) and Longpré (2013).

9. According to Lamarre (2013) Montreal has the highest bilingual rates in Canada. It also has a unique history of separate institutions and according to recent studies new and significant forms of trilingualism.

10. In In this text, I have not looked at the role of other groups that can be seen as predecessors or contemporaries to Dead Obies (for example Loud Lary Ajust or Alaclair Ensemble, to mention only two). For an excellent overview of the Montréal hip-hop scene, see Leblanc (2010).

11. Though increasingly, immigrants in the Montreal region are moving to the ring of suburban communities outside of Montreal (see Germain, Rose, and Richard 2012).

12. While some genres of popular music in Québec may reflect the demographic diversity of Montréal (where one in three people were born outside of Canada), mainstream representations of linguistic and racial diversity have lagged behind considerably (Pruneau 2016), especially compared to the rest of Canada.

13. Rioux (2014) criticized the intentional use of English in the music of Dead Obies as a form of “cultural suicide”, but he also criticized their artistic practice as less artful than previous Québecois artists, because the French language is “drowned out” by English. In response to Rioux, journalist Cassivi (2014) writes of their work that it is an inventive language which is “just subversive enough” to cause fear about the future of French-Canadians among a certain reactionary minority.

14. The relatively young field of popular music studies has been plagued by a tendancy among scholars to focus on lyrics and their “message” at the expense of the analysis of sound (White 2008). I have decided to focus on language in this analysis because of its centrality to the musical genre, but also because the public debate about this music in Québec has been focused on this issue.

15. The analysis of code-switching presented in this analysis is based on Myers-Scotton’s “matrix language frame” model which distinguishes between matrix languages (meaning the language which determines the syntax of an expression or morpheme) and embedded languages which contribute content to morphemes. According to this model the basic unit of analysis is not the word or the sentence but the complementizer projection (CP), defined as “the syntactic structure expressing the predicate-argument structure of a clause, plus any additional structure or element needed to encode discourse-relevant structure and the logical form of that clause” (Myers-Scotton 2002, 54). Content morphemes express semantic or pragmatic aspects and assign or receive thematic roles, while system morphemes express the relation between content morphemes.

16. LeBlanc, Boudreault-Fournier, and Djerrahian (2007) suggest that hip-hop in Montréal emerges primarily among disadvantaged youth in neighbourhoods plagued by social tension and structural poverty, as is the case with regards to the original hip-hop scene in New York City. Much of the literature on global hip-hop suggests that outside of Western industrialized nations, hip-hop tends to begin as a middle-class phenomenon, especially among young people with access to university education and international travel (see Mourre 2017).

17. Following the defeat of the Parti Québécois in the 1995 referendum on Québec’s separation from Canada, a controversy emerged around then prime minister Jacques Parizeau’s comments blaming the loss on the “ethnic vote”. This controversy represented a turning point in the perceptions about the French-speaking majority and to this day haunts defenders of Québec’s sovereignty movement.

18. Several recent high-profile events in Québec have called attention to this trend: 1) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concerning the history of systemic racism in residential schools for Québec’s indigenous populations, 2) the Ministry of Immigration’s failed attempt to organize a public consultation on systemic racism and 3) the recent controversy on Robert Lepage’s production about the experience of transatlantic slavery: SLAV.

19. See the discussion of majority-minority relations as a triangular phenomenon in Winter (2011). On the relationship between multiculturalism and interculturalism in Québec, see White (forthcoming).

20. See Chamberland (2001), LeBlanc, Boudreault-Fournier, and Djerrahian (2007), and Taylor (2012).

21. There is obviously nothing unique or new about rap music being perceived as a threat by cultural or racial majorities. From the beginning of the literature on rap music, scholars have called attention to what rapper Chuck D referred to as the “fear of a black planet” (for an early discussion of this phenomenon, see Rose 1994).

22. For a discussion of this question in Québec, see Low, Sarkar, and Winer (2009), LeBlanc, Boudreault-Fournier, and Djerrahian (2007) and Laabidi (2010).

23. Ransom (2013) proposes an analysis that shows three different Québec-based rappers attempting to find a language for explaining the future of majority-minority relations in Québec : French-Canadian heritage as a potential source of unity (Loco Locass), political recognition between indigenous and European nations (Samian), historical self-awareness as a means of recognizing white privilege (Webster).