All together now, let’s sing anthem in French!

Armchair Mayor column, Saturday, March 6, 2010

After we were done singing O Canada at the opening of the World Masters Indoor Athletic Championships up at the Tournament Capital Centre, Syd leaned over and whispered, “Cathy switched to French with the choir.”

Good on Cathy McLeod, our MP, and good on Syd for noticing — she was impressed and so was I.

As for me, when the choir sang in French, I kept plowing ahead in English. It wasn’t a protest; I’ve just never learned the anthem in French. Other than McLeod, it would seem our other local politicians haven’t either — they were caught off guard, their voices lowered and their lips moved gamely but ineffectually in an attempt to look like they were with the program.

Brent Butt once surmised that our anthem is an afterthought, as in “Oh. . . Canada.” However, I believe it’s an important deal.

I think I’ll learn the French parts, so I can be cool like Cathy McLeod. I wonder, though, if I’ll have to learn the French words for “in all thy sons and daughters command,” but the Conservatives changed their minds about recognizing the other half of the population in our anthem.

Under protest, I studied French throughout high school. No French Immersion for me, Buster — I drove my teachers to despair trying to instruct me in the nuances of the French verb system.

I didn’t appreciate it then, but I do now, for it’s a handy thing to be able to understand a bit of French signage or pick up the meaning when a speaker switches between French and English.

The current debate over how much French is too much French — generating from the Olympics ceremonies — baffles me. It’s gratifying to see that most of our letters to the editor have been in support of bilingualism, but I know there’s also a view that segregation is the way to go.

But sameness is so boring. According to people who study these things, Francophones and Anglophones drink about the same amount of booze and have sex as often as the other. They drive the same cars, buy the same TVs, and both think Stephen Harper is kind of dorky.

Differences are much more interesting. Thompson Rivers University has made Kamloops an international community. How charming it is to hear Japanese or Chinese students, or kids from Brazil or Saudi Arabia or any number of other countries happily chattering in their own language.

It makes us richer. So do the Masters Athletic Championships. All over town this week we’ve been treated to incredibly fit older visitors speaking German, Hungarian, or American. The latter can be one of the more challenging ones to understand.

We feel challenged when we see people who are different from ourselves, so we object to it — “You should at least sound like I do.”

There’s an element of frustration in hearing two people speak another language and we can’t listen in because we don’t understand what they’re saying. And have you ever noticed that when we’re trying to explain something in English to a non-English speaker, we get louder and louder as if the problem is their hearing?

Languages are, basically, cultural differences with sound, and cultural differences are in our brains. They’re part of our genetic makeup, as well as part of how we were raised. It’s the same with men and women. It’s also the same with parents and teenagers. We all think differently, look differently, and speak different languages.

Though I’m not a natural, I like to try out new languages.

“Yo, J-Dog,” I’ll say to our son, Jacob. “Sup?”

“Don’t,” he’ll say, making it clear he has no time to provide a language lesson on Youth Speak. Unlike his father, he is blessed with quite amazing language abilities. In his younger years, he was fluent in Klingon.

Since then, he’s moved on to Japanese, which he not only speaks but writes faster than most of us write English. I never got much past “konichiwa.” He studies Portuguese on the Internet in his spare time.

“Nobody speaks Portuguese,” I tell him. “Why not Spanish? There’s a language, at least, that’s spoken in more than one or two countries. Or Mandarin. That would be useful. There are 1.3 billion Chinese; the chances of you running into one are pretty good.”

He ignores me, of course, and carries on with his Portuguese, boning up on the history of Brazil for good measure.

The point is this: Why do we worry so much about the ratio of French to English at ceremonies and such things? Nobody but a Canadian would have understood what William Shatner was talking about at the closing of the Olympics, but I haven’t heard the Americans or the Swiss or the Koreans complaining about it.

As for our national anthem, it would be a darn good idea if we all sang part of it in French. Let’s join Cathy McLeod and belt out, with gusto, “Il sait porter la croix!”

And maybe a couple of words of Inuktitut, too.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

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