Revealing family letters

For researchers, a well-stocked family archive can be a real Aladdin’s cave. In Saguenay, such a treasure trove recently shed light on how language was used in the early 20^th century.

Sandrine Tailleur, a sociolinguistics researcher at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, was given access to the Dubuc family archives. Using over 2,000 handwritten pages from letters written between 1893 and 1929, the researcher analyzed, among other things, the use of English in the letters. She discovered a complex linguistic dynamic that reveals the relationship between French and English in the Saguenay region in the early 1900s.

At that time, the majority of the population in this region of Québec were French speakers. However, it was English-speaking families who held economic power and controlled the major industries. The Dubucs were a fairly wealthy French-speaking family who had to master both languages to maintain their social status.

Even when writing to each other, it was not uncommon for family members to use English words or expressions. The children had an English-speaking nanny. One of the girls even punctuated her letters with terms such as “hugs and kisses.” The Dubucs also used fashionable English words, such as “living room” instead of “salon,” “shops” instead of “magasins”, and “skating rink” instead of “patinoire.” This was a sign of their social status.

When Sandrine Tailleur and her team expanded their research to include corpora from the Centre-du-Québec and Outaouais regions, they observed the same dynamics. French-speaking families used language as a tool for social prestige, navigating between Québec French, French “from France”, and English in order to preserve their high social status.

The researcher is continuing this study to determine the influence these wealthy French-speaking families had on the way French is spoken and written in Québec today.