Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm going to answer Borys on the subject of what's called the vernacular, a question of great interest to me. English is spoken in Utah, New England, Scotland and various regions of the world. All those people speak a vernacular language, that is to say they have their own expressions, but there is only one English grammar.
It's the same thing in French. There is only one French grammar, but there are a number of ways of speaking the language. The people of Lac-Saint-Jean, Montreal, the Outaouais, Haiti, Belgium and certain regions of France have their vernacular language. It's an asset.
What is important is to learn the grammar well. When you know your grammar, you can adapt to the work place and to the people you're speaking with. That's what Antonine Maillet is demonstrating when she denies that she has an Acadian accent.
For example, in Quebec French and Acadian French, we say “moé” and “toé”, as they said in the 16th and 17th centuries. They talked about the “roué” and not the “roi”. Things evolve with time. These are vernacular expressions, but there's only one grammar. You can offend people if you tell them that their French or English is not as good as that of others. You have to keep that in mind when you teach French.
Mr. Gravelle talked about teaching and what we call the intermediate learning system. A person who has gone through all the stages of learning another language is in a better position to teach it than another person who already masters the language and who has not gone through all those stages. An anglophone student who has managed to learn French in an immersion program and who subsequently wants to teach it will be more understanding of his students. That concerns language learning.
Mr. Ipperciel cited a figure earlier. I'm torn by it and it's one of the reasons why I'm in politics. It was the number of FL1s, which means French as a first language, in Canada. I don't really like the expression, but it's a reality. People born in a French-language family and culture are being assimilated so that they no longer speak French at all at 17, 22 or 40 years of age, regardless of age.
We've established institutions. I'm thinking of the Faculté Saint-Jean, the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface and the Collège universitaire de Hearst. There comes a time when those institutions can no longer serve their own community, the one for which they were created. Some 27% of the student body at the Faculté Saint-Jean are Franco-Albertans, or FL1s, whether they be Franco-Manitobans, Quebeckers or other francophones.
I think assimilation is a major problem and a cancer as regards non-respect of the French fact across Canada. There are even regions in Quebec where French is losing ground. Come and take a tour of Pontiac. I'm a Nadeau and my mother is a Lalonde, but since people only speak English in my region, our names are pronounced with an English accent. Assimilation is progressing.
You talked about socio-linguistics earlier. When you teach political science and history, do you make your students aware of the fact that it is crucially important to ensure that those who speak French very young not become a pale reflection of those who have assimilated them later on? Is that done?
I don't think the university programs of English Canadians who don't understand Quebec take that fact into account. Moreover, they don't understand the French-language minorities because they don't even know the word “assimilation”.
