Bilingual/bilingue

I’m only 75, and I’ve already been bilingual twice.

The first time, of course, was that relatively brief period after arriving in Canada between becoming functional in English and then dropping the Dutch entirely, even at home.

At first my parents really tried to maintain our Dutch at home and we must have done that, because at the time my mom’s English really wasn’t up to much. But when I was in Grade 6 my parents decided that they needed to go to Normal School to become teachers, and so Dutch was dropped en famille in favour of English. The family never went back.  My sister, who was 5 when we left Holland, has since regained a fair bit of fluency and my youngest brother, who wasn’t actually speaking yet when we left, spent a year in Holland after high school and became quite proficient. I, who first learned to read in Holland, can still read rudimentary Dutch, very slowly, because I have to sound the words out, and have retained an accent in the few words and phrases I can bring up when the situation requires that temporarily convinces Dutch speakers that I remain competent. 

It doesn’t take many sentences of very juvenile Dutch delivered in that authentic Dutch accent to disabuse them of that thought, however!

I’m often asked whether I regret that loss of my native language. No, I don’t. Our Dutch relatives are all really comfortable in English and my parents only spoke Dutch when relatives from Holland visited, and sometimes not then, so our incentives were and are limited. It’s not like Dutch is a very useful language...

Unlike French, which is, and especially in Canada. 

My dad had received a classic “Gymnasium” education: Dutch, French, English, German, Latin, and Greek. He was quite sure that his children should emulate that model to the extent possible, which meant English, French, and Latin. Being the eldest, I got to try out this educational theory, which is why I took Latin by Correspondence in Grade 9 and the second level in Grade 10 in a school where it was offered by my favourite teacher, who more regularly taught English.

I hated Latin, which was all rules of grammar and their application and I just hated rules of grammar. The joys of solving the elegant puzzle of Latin constructions, which people like my spouse claim to have relished, entirely escaped me.

Lesson learned: though it was available in a few schools in BC and always by Correspondence until the beginning of the present century, no other Havelaar took Latin in a Canadian high school. (Sandy took it in high school and at UVic, but she was an Irvine at the time!)**

But I liked French, took it all the way through high school, was active in the French Club, did fine, marks-wise, and cleverly took the “recommendation” on offer instead of taking the government exam, which undoubtedly required more knowledge of grammar than I had bothered to acquire.

Here the trail gets predictably sticky: because I had passed Grade 12 French, I was required to take the harder of the two first-year options at Uvic. And because I did well enough in that to pass comfortably, I was required to take the follow-up course the next year. 

And that is where my ability to fake competence in French came up against the hard reality of never actually mastering the grammar. Not once, but twice.

Eventually the rules were changed, and I managed to get my BA without second-year French.

Fast-forward a significant number of years. We’re living in Campbell River, where I’m teaching high school English and Sandy is teaching music theory. Sandy has a BA in French, the first three of our 4 children are already enrolled in French Immersion, and the youngest is due to enter “la maternelle” in the fall. I can see how this is going to end if I don’t do something about my lack of French skills: in a very few years the entire family is going to have conversations in a language I don’t understand. 

Besides, my failure still rankles.

So we decide to take a year off, rent out our house, and pile the entire Troop in our large, 12-passenger van. We’re off to Quebec City, where I’ve enrolled in a “French for non-Francophones” program at Université Laval and where the kids will spend the year in unilingual Quebec schools.

I arrive at Laval on the appointed day at the appointed lecture hall so I can take the competence exam, which will place me in the appropriate level. And once again my superficial appearance of competence strikes: I’m placed in the top level, along with students who are actually reasonably competent, in that they can speak what for all the world sounds like French to me. People who graduated from French Immersion programs but apparently didn’t learn the fine points, for example.

I realize immediately that I’m in well over my head.

There are 20 of us in the group, and I’m the oldest and least-competent. In the first session, trying to remember enough to explain myself to the class, I explain that “mon mari” and I normally live in Colombie-Britannique... and am at first puzzled by the burst of spontaneous laughter, then humiliated to discover that I’ve just told the class my that husband and I... You get the picture. 

It doesn’t get better for some time, and I’ve never worked harder or more persistently at anything academic than I did that year. Fear of being exposed as incompetent is a great motivator. But the results were worth the effort. By the end of December I had graduated out of the FNF program, and by the end of the year had completed the first half of Laval’s first-year French program.

For the second time in my life, I was declared and felt bilingual.

(Three years later I had negotiated an exchange to teach English in a rural school halfway between Victoriaville and Drummondville, so we returned to Quebec. But that’s another story.)

So that was me; what about the rest of the family?

When our kids started in French Immersion we heard a lot from “experts” who object to the program because: Immersion French is typically full of errors and anglicisms; too many of the students never achieve real mastery; the students’ English skills will deteriorate; the program is elitist.  There may be kernels of truth in all those observations, although we didn’t experience any of them.

Once Sandy had found us a place to live she registered the kids in local schools. For the three older ones, the transition was entirely seamless, as an anecdote will illustrate: Enid had just completed Grade 1 in Campbell River with Julie, a lovely young teacher originally from rural Quebec. In Beauport, where we now lived, she was in a Grade 2 class with two teachers, only one of whom Sandy had met previously. In October, during parent-teacher conferences, she met the other: “Enid is a good student, but has curious holes in her vocabulary. She didn’t know what a “chaloupe” is, for example.” Apparently no one had mentioned that Enid was an anglophone from BC!

Robin, our youngest, had a different experience: she started in the “maternelle” at another school and was picked up and dropped off each day by a little yellow bus. For the first few months of Maternelle parents were not welcome at the school, where there were no English speakers. In other words, she replicated the traditional immigrant experience: didn’t speak at school at all until late January and refused to speak English by the time we returned home again in July. Just like her dad!

Our kids are now the age Sandy and I were at the time. All of them are still competent in French, two have children in BC’s francophone school system (District 93) and two teach French in public high schools. All of them have had occasions to use their French skills.

As for me, we last lived in Quebec nearly 30 years ago, and what you don’t use, you lose. I no longer feel comfortable speaking (terrible accent never went away!) and writing French. I think if I ever had to, I could probably manage, but it would be a real chore. 

I still read French comfortably, so all is not all lost, but no longer consider myself bilingual.

Except for the census, of course, because being bilingual is a political statement in Canada, and I have papers to prove I’m entitled to use the designation!

**My siblings assure me I'm wrong on this recollection: they took it as well. Both
brothers recall hating Latin as much as I had so I was also wrong to feel uniquely
persecuted! I'm pretty confident, however, that years later, when my dad and I
were both working English teachers, he confessed he could no longer see the point.