Le français québécois 101

C’est quoi exactement, le français québécois? Dans cette vidéo, j’explique les grandes différences entre le français québécois et le français standard, j’explore ses multiples variantes, et je parle de la relation entre le français québécois et le français canadien.

LE FRANÇAIS QUÉBÉCOIS, C’EST QUOI? | Québécois 101

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t5Ax1Foic4

Fabriquer une mémoire conforme à un programme politique : une subvention particulièrement importante (900 000$) est attribuée à la Fondation Lionel-Groulx au titre du Programme pour la valorisation et la vitalité de la langue française, sans tenir compte des dernières recherches menées par les universitaires historiens.

"Le ministre de la Langue française, Jean-François Roberge, se réjouit pour sa part que « les personnages et les événements marquants de notre riche histoire nationale » figurent dans ce projet qui contribuera « à l’intégration à la nation québécoise et à la valorisation de notre belle langue officielle et commune », pouvait-on lire dans le communiqué annonçant le projet à la mi-juin".

Un classique des interférences possibles entre histoire, mémoire et pouvoir politique.

"Des historiens sceptiques par rapport à trois bédés historiques sur la Nouvelle-France"
https://www.ledevoir.com/actualites/education/990740/historiens-sceptiques-rapport-trois-bedes-historiques-nouvelle-france

#histoire #memoire #quebec #CAQ #nation #historiographie

Given that the prevailing orientation on this platform tends to be #progressive many of the observations that follow will likely be already familiar, if not obvious, to those reading me. Nevertheless, I believe it is worthwhile to offer a more articulated reflection on the recent neo-fascist and #ultranationalist waves sweeping across #europe insinuating themselves into everyday discourse with a language that blends identity anxiety with "sovereigntist" claims.

What is particularly striking is the absence of any coherent economic project beneath this identity-driven rhetoric. I struggle to discern a clear, defined, and workable plan for that phantom model of society which, by gazing backward, promises to safeguard national well-being. One inevitably wonders about the concrete nature of this vision. Is it perhaps a return to a pre-globalization era? If so, what instruments do they intend to employ? Do they plan to tighten fiscal pressure on domestic companies that, showing little patriotic attachment, have offshored production? Do they think of blocking low-cost imports from China, or of replicating on a smaller scale the US model of selective tariffs? Then there is the question of #remigration perhaps the most emblematic and relentlessly promoted, though riddled with deep inconsistencies. The obsession with expelling migrants is presented as a panacea for all the country's ills, but the reasoning does not hold. Even if we expelled them all, structural problems such as job precarity, an ailing healthcare system, abandoned peripheries, and the lack of public services would remain intact.

Thus far, these are my doubts concerning the economic dimension. But my true interest, the question that most concerns me as a historian, lies on a different plane, deeper and perhaps more elusive. What does it mean today to identify with a #nation? It is a theme I have long studied, fascinated by the centrality of ethnic discourse in political debate and, at the same time, by its consistently superficial treatment in the mass media. The nation, in fact, is neither an eternal entity nor a given of nature. Like all social constructs, it has a beginning, a development, and, of course, an end. Just think of how many peoples have disappeared over the course of history, assimilated, transformed, become something else. If we look at the Italian case, it becomes evident that our cultural heritage is not the fruit of some purported original essence or irremediable immutability, but rather the result of stratifications, overlays, and hybridizations that, over the centuries, have left an indelible mark on the construction of what we might call #Italianness. When we think of the construction of our cultural symbols, our minds inevitably turn to Magna Graecia and ancient Rome, but our imaginary is equally marked by Byzantium, the Lombards, the Normans, the Aragonese, and the Angevins. There are Arab influences in Sicily, French influences in Piedmont, Spanish influences in the Kingdom of Naples, not to mention the historical presence of Albanian, Croatian, and Slovenian communities within the peninsula's territories. Italy, long before becoming a unitary state, was for centuries a crossroads of the Mediterranean and Europe, a place of passage, exchange, and intermingling, a continuous laboratory of cultural hybridization.

Consider then language, perhaps the most striking example. The Italian we speak today is not the product of a natural necessity, but of a literary and political choice. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio did not write in standard Italian but in Florentine vernacular, one dialect among many, which only centuries later, thanks to schooling, politics, the authority of poets and writers, and eventually the mass media, would be elevated to a common language. This process, it must be said, was imposed from above as an instrument of national unification. Even today, anyone living in Italy knows that dialects are not corruptions of Italian but autonomous languages, often older than the nation itself, custodians of stories, knowledge, and worldviews at risk of flattening in the modern age, but continuing to resist, reminding us that Italy has always been an archipelago of voices.

Therefore, and here I believe left-wing movements make a mistake in not emphasizing this with sufficient force, the nation is, in Eric Hobsbawm's words, an "invented tradition," or, in Benedict Anderson's phrasing, an "imagined community." One is not physiologically born Italian. Had I not been educated within the national school system, I would probably have spoken Neapolitan all my life, never feeling the need to learn the standard language. The nation, as a product of modernity, is not a natural given but a historical artifact that, in order to survive and reproduce itself, requires an elaborate identity engineering. It needs schooling to standardize language and culture across the territory, mass media to "synchronize" citizens' experiences and make them feel part of a shared collective destiny, and finally the construction of an other against which to define the boundaries of belonging. It is this mechanism that, in times of crisis, transforms otherness into a threat, if not an enemy, bringing the specters of the past back into our present.

Nouveau #Passeport des #US à l' occasion du 250ème anniversaire des #USA :

#AUTO #GLORIFICATION #OUTRANCIÈRE.

La #déviance #narcissique d'un petit #Dictateur #nombriliste et complètement imbu de lui, en puissance

La #décadence d'une #grande #nation : par la preuve.

En Live

https://www.franceinfo.fr/en-direct/message/6a3f8efc1f44e57c16020398.html

#Claude_Joseph_Rouget_de_Lisle und sein Lied für die #Ewigkeit

Er schreibt ein #Lied für den #Krieg und prägt damit #Nation und #Geschichte. Doch der Mann hinter der "#Marseillaise" ist kein #Revolutionär, sondern ein #Außenseiter seiner Zeit.
https://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr5/sendungen/zeitzeichen/zeitzeichen-claude-joseph-rouget-de-lisle-todestag-100.html

#Zeitzeichen