Métro Sherbrooke - Photo par Baptiste Michaud, Flickr

Languages are a passion of mine. I studied English literature at university and taught it for four years in a Montreal college.

I’ve also taught English as a second language, both in Montreal and in my newly adopted home of Vancouver; and if I’m not studying or teaching English, there’s a good chance I’m reading an Albert Camus novel, watching a Montreal Canadiens hockey game, or trying to chat up some francophones – all in an effort to get my head, and tongue, around my second language, French.

I moved to Vancouver this past summer with my spouse, who is doing a family medicine residency at the University of British Columbia.

As I expected, trying to keep up one’s French in Vancouver isn’t easy. Here, French is not the language one sees on street signs and billboards or expects to speak in restaurants, shops, and cafes.

That’s not to say there’s no francophone culture here – the city’s French-speaking community, albeit small, is active and well-organized – but you do have to actively seek it out.

My introduction to English-French bilingualism came early in life. Growing up in Montreal in the 1980s, I heard and spoke English at home but learned and communicated en français at school.

Exposed early on to French, I picked it up quickly and by age ten, when my family relocated from Montreal to a small-town in southwestern Ontario, my French was excellent.

Unfortunately, it didn’t stay that way. I lost a lot of my childhood French in Ontario.

When I moved back to Montreal 12 years after leaving, I was shocked at how hard it was to keep up a conversation with the Québécois cabby who picked me up at the train station.

Thus began the sometimes arduous, often enjoyable, somewhat haphazard process of relearning French in my spare time, a journey I’ve been on for almost 10 years now.

Interestingly, I find Vancouver in some ways an easier place to practice my French than Montreal. In Montreal, when speaking French to strangers, I experience a kind of low-level politico-linguistic anxiety, fearing that a mispronounced syllable or wrongly gendered article might set the cause of Franco-Anglo understanding in Canada back by 10 years.

Or, worse yet, that my imperfect use of French will cause my Franco interlocutor to give up and, with a sigh of resignation, reboot the conversation in English.

By comparison, here in Vancouver, since there’s no expectation that one should know French well, I find myself speaking it, when I do, less self-consciously.

To be fair to Montreal Francophones, whom I’ve found to be as a rule warm and decent folks, the trepidation I feel around their language is as much due to my own insecurities as to the city’s language politics. And if they do make that dreaded switch from French to English, they’re usually trying to be
accommodating.

The Anglophone Vancouverites I’ve met seem to regard French as I do Spanish, of which I learned some basics before travelling to Spain a few summers ago.

“Learning Spanish is fun! And politically uncomplicated!” I remember thinking, as I worked my way through 30 Days to Great Spanish in my Plateau Mont Royal apartment before the trip.

My impression is that non-francophone Vancouverites who study French do so in a similarly happy-go-lucky spirit. Their thoughts are not on the last Quebec referendum, but on learning to watch Amélie without subtitles or to order crème brulée in a Parisian café.

If it’s true Anglophone Francophiles here draw their inspiration from France more so than Quebec, it’s hard not to see this as confirmation that, for Anglos and Francos in Canada, cultural-linguistic exchange isn’t the easy and innocent pleasure that we wish it was.

But then, expecting any linguistic exchange to be purely and totally fun is naïve. As I discovered before leaving for Spain, the Castilian Spanish I was blithely learning may have been the language of Madrid, but it wasn’t necessarily that of Barcelona, where the street signs were written in a language, Catalan, that had once been officially suppressed.

Closer to home, I would guess that the social-political anxiety I sometimes felt in Montreal is a familiar feeling to many Vancouverites for whom speaking French – not to mention Mandarin, Cantonese, or Punjabi – comes more naturally than speaking English.

Having spent a lot of time trying to teach English, and a good many hours trying to learn French, I know first-hand how much dedication, patience, and hard work it takes to master a second language, especially for adults. And I know that as difficult as the process is, it can also be a remarkably enriching one.

It’s a long, demanding and sometimes frustrating undertaking. And ultimately it’s worth it.