Starting points: the Quest begins

Anyone who's spent any time with me over the past few years knows that I've been absolutely obsessed with learning French. Though it never replaced my obsession with the team in Honolulu Blue, Silver and Black during football season, it ran a close second. I took evening French classes, rented French language dvds... I even bought an interactive CD-ROM. All this to try and get better at the language. I think I've done pretty well, so far. There's more to be done, of course, but I've got time.

Along the way, I realised that learning a language is about more than conjugating verbs or making sure that adjectives agree in gender and number to the noun they're modifying. Language becomes a part of the people who use it, so for me to deepen my understanding of French, I needed to go where it's actually spoken on a daily basis. In Canada, that's Québec. So what do we know about la belle province? I decided to take a quick gander at the Statistics Canada website to dig up some preliminary information.

As of October 1, 2005, Québec had an estimated population of 7,616,645 people. Unfortunately, I don't have current data pertaining to the languages spoken in Québec, so I'll lean on the 2001 figures. At that point, approximately 54% of the province only spoke French and 41% of the people could speak both official languages. I have no idea whether this has changed over the past 5 years or not, but either way, it's still a substantial number of French-speaking people. So what are they like? Are they THAT different from English-speaking Canadians? That's what I'm trying to find out.

As luck would have it, there was a special edition of L'actualité that came out in November of 2005 with the title, 101 mots pour comprendre le Québec. That's what I call timing! Naturally, I picked it up to see how they described themselves. The issue contained a series of commentaries from artisits, politicians, authors, pretty much whoever they wanted, discussing a particular word alloted to them by the issue's editors. One section that I found particularly interesting was the piece called "Les Québécois en 10 adjectifs." And though I know its inclusion in the edition was done mainly for the purposes of humour, I think they were pretty much bang-on in their descriptions.

Here's the list they came up with. I'll be adding my own comments or summarizing theirs, depending on how the mood strikes me. Don't worry, I'll translate for you:

(1) Fier: very simply, proud. Sounds about right to me. They're proud of their heritage, their culture and their contributions to the world (though they tend to ignore their contributions to Canada).
(2) Hédoniste: they're all about pleasure. This comes through in the "joie de vivre" that we anglos tend to notice. It's a party culture, in many ways. That certainly explains the "climat de permissivité sexuelle et de sensualité" that one finds everywhere in Montréal.
(3) Bouillant: I think this roughly translates to "hot-tempered" or "passionate." I noticed this with a former coworker from the call center. This girl would argue her point until you thought she'd explode--even when she was proven wrong. But it's that fire that set her apart from the other employees. And it's that fire that seems to live in the hearts of any Québécois I've ever met.
(4) Individualiste: This one is pretty straight forward, as well. Do your own thing and be your own person and you'll get along fine with the Québécois. Just don't try and tell them how to live their lives. You'll run headlong into point (3) if you do.
(5) Insouciant: carefree.
(6) Tolérant: In terms of their attitudes towards sex, drugs, prostitution, definitions of the term "family", sure, they're very tolerant. They're free-spirits. But of all the adjectives the article came up with, this is the one I disagree with the most. They're not very tolerant in terms of their language. I've had a rough time finding work so far, mainly because of the lack of tolerance. But then, that's just my opinion.
(7) Grégaire: gregarious or social. They're a lively bunch and they love to socialize. This goes back to the "joie de vivre" mentioned earlier.
(8) Enraciné: They're entrenched in their culture. They're proud of who they are and want to protect who it.
(9) Prudent: They're not big on taking risks. That being said, I wonder why we have such a high number of aerial freestyle skiiers of Québécois origin... ?
(10) Macho: This sentiment goes back as far as the colonies. The Coureur des Bois and the Voyageurs who followed in their footsteps were manly men of the wilderness. Women were supposed to stay home and mind the household. Though I imagine this is in the process of changing (after all, Québec has one of the strongest Women's Rights movements around), it's only been a couple of generations since women started taking their place beside men in the workplace. This machismo will be a part of la memoire collective for quite some time.

So that's my starting point. I guess I'll see in the weeks and months to come how accurate this portrayal really is. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.