Parents are so-o-o-o out of touch, as everyone knows.
Just listen to how they say street names.
Like “St. Lawrence.” Or “St. Denny.” Or “Mountain St.” I mean, it’s embarrassing!
“It’s de la Montagne,” says Jessica Kirsh, 22, a recent art history graduate of Concordia University. “I don’t call it Mountain,” she says.
“No one ever says that, do they?” queries her boyfriend, Jordan Smith, 24, a manager of a holistic pet store who was educated in Paris.
No one, that is, except Jessica’s father, Stanley, who grew up in Mile End and Côte des Neiges and stubbornly says “Mountain,” “St. Lawrence” and “Devimmy” for, respectively, de la Montagne, St. Laurent and de Vimy Sts.
Once dubbed the city of Two Solitudes, Montreal has many more linguistic divides today, some of them generational.
While older anglophones live in Chatta-gee and Long-gail, eat smoked meat on St. Lawrence and pronounce “Guy St.” as in “Family Guy”, under-30s are apt to live near “avenue du Mont-Royal,” drink on “St. Laurent” and take the métro to Guy-Concordia, with “Guy” pronounced like Guy Lafleur. They go to Irish pubs on “de la Montagne,” share digs on St. Dominique (pronounced like “pique-nique”), and master the correct vowel sounds in “Longueuil” and “Jeanne Mance.” (Hint: the latter does not rhyme with “green pants.”)
The product of French immersion schools and, in some cases, French schools, young anglophones are more likely to pronounce the names of familiar landmarks in French than their parents are, according to Charles Boberg, an associate professor of linguistics at McGill University who specializes in language change and English-Canadian dialects.
“I think you’re beginning to see more French pronunciations in Montreal English than you would have a generation ago,” Boberg said.
That’s largely a result of the fact that more than two-thirds of young anglophones are bilingual, he said.
“There may also be an enthusiasm among young anglophones for using the correct French names,” Boberg said.
“There’s a great sense of living in a French-speaking society.”
Still, there are exceptions. While young anglophones call the Main “St. Laurent,” they generally pronounce Ste. Catherine St. the English way. And even with the same names, there is a certain amount of variation.
“The métro station is Guy-Concordia (pronounced like Guy Fawkes) but the street is Guy (like Guy Laroche),” says Jessica’s brother, Nat, 18, a second-year science and music student at Marianopolis College.
Not only do young anglos pronounce street names in French; many also swing between English and French slang.
“Even my hardcore anglophone friends, they’ll say ‘Ouache!’ if something is gross,” says Smith.
“If they’re actually speaking French they’ll start swearing in French. If they’re in English, they swear in English,” Nat Kirsh chimes in.
Recent media reports charged that English is on the rise in Montreal and that young anglophones are indifferent to francophone culture. But the everyday language used by young anglophones shows their culture is deeply imprinted by Montreal’s linguistic environment, Boberg says.
Devin Alfaro, a master’s student in urban planning at the Université de Montréal, finds it odd to hear English versions of street names. Even when speaking English, Alfaro pronounces streets like “St. Marc,” “St. Mathieu” and “Avenue des Pins” in French.
“My rule of thumb is if a street has a French name, I pronounce it as in French,” said Alfaro, 24, who moved to the city six years ago from his native Los Angeles.
That’s a turnaround from a long-standing tradition in the English-speaking community to anglicize place names. In the days when St. James St. – now St. Jacques St. – was the banking capital of Canada and greystone mansions lined Dorchester St., de la Commune St. was known as Commissioners’ St. and other Old Montreal arteries like St. Peter St. (now St. Pierre) had English monikers.
Outside Montreal, place names from Two Mountains (Deux Montagnes) to Murray Bay (La Malbaie) reflected the English-speaking presence. That’s hardly surprising, Boberg said, since English-speakers formed a majority in Montreal and the Eastern Townships in the mid-1800s and a significant share of the population in other regions, including the Gaspé and Quebec City.
Anglophones have declined to eight per cent from a quarter of Quebec’s population in the 1960s, Boberg noted.
In the Gaspé, former English-speaking communities like Indian Cove (now an uninhabited area of Forillon National Park known as l’Anse aux Sauvages) are all but forgotten, as are English versions of place names like Fox River (Rivière au Renard), Grand River (Grande Rivière) and Corner of the Beach (Coin du Banc).
In the Jewish immigrant neighbourhood of the 1940s immortalized by Mordecai Richler, Coloniale St. was pronounced “Colonial” and Roy St. was pronounced like Roy Rogers.
Kirsh, 58, now a Côte St. Luc resident, has childhood memories of hanging out at his parents’ store at the corner of St. Urbain and Fairmount Sts. “I remember growing up there, going across the street of Wilensky’s, they had comic books. If the cover was ripped off, you could get it for three cents,” he reminiscences.
Richard Brisebois, 63, who grew up in east-end Montreal, still pronounces the first syllable in Iberville St. like “eye” and says “Noter-Dame Street.” His family lived in a neighbourhood he still calls “Long Point” (Longue Pointe) and later moved to Rosemont – which to Brisebois will ever be known as “Rosemount.”
As anglophones have dwindled and become increasingly concentrated in enclaves like the West Island, English versions of street names in the inner-city and east end have fallen into disuse.
French signs required by Bill 101, which establishes French as Quebec’s only official language, have reinforced the use of French place names, Boberg said.
Dave Powell, a sales consultant at The Gazette and Pierrefonds resident, noted his kids call the well-known West Island artery “St. Jean” while he says “St. John’s.”
Young anglophones’ tendency to use French monikers for city streets does not necessarily signal a sense of identification with francophone society, says Pierrette Thibault, a professor of anthropology at the Université de Montréal who specializes in the encounter of French and English in Quebec. “It’s a way of demonstrating their (linguistic) competence,” said Thibault. The use of French place-names in English is an example of code-switching, where bilingual and trilingual speakers switch from one language to another in mid-conversation, she said.
The use of French place names in Montreal is also part of a global trend toward replacing traditional English versions of foreign place names like Bombay, Peking and Burma with more authentic ones like Mumbai, Beijing and Myanmar, Boberg said. The trend is related to the dominance of English in an increasingly globalized world, he said. “There is pressure on English to adopt sensitive pronunciation,” he said.