The linguistic roller coaster that is Québec

For visiting Americans, there’s an art to dealing with the language barrier in the predominantly French-speaking Canadian province of Québec, as I was reminded when my wife Liz and I visited Québec City recently. 

Actually, “barrier” is too strong a term in my case, because I grew up in a French-speaking home in Massachusetts, the grandson of French-Canadian immigrants. In fact, I spoke no English until I started school. But I rarely speak French these days, so although my pronunciation and syntax remain sound, my vocabulary has slipped quite a bit, and I sometimes find myself struggling to conjure up the right word in conversation. 

With that in mind, here are a few personal observations from my visits to Québec province, including our most recent stay there last week.

• Do not address a complete stranger in English, except to ask if he or she speaks English. Better yet, a simple “parlez-vous anglais?” is the best way to go. English is a foreign language there, after all. When a worker at a Québec City lunch counter greeted me in French last week, I asked him, in French, if he spoke English. He immediately switched to English and thanked me profusely for posing the question. He even said I had made his day by being respectful. 

• Québécois are more likely to be able to speak English in cities, especially in tourism-based businesses like hotels and restaurants, than elsewhere. If you’re buying gas in a small town or shopping at a suburban mall, for example, expect to do business in French. 

• Even in urban areas, some local people are uncomfortable speaking English, or unable to do so. In one Québec City restaurant last week, our waitress asked me for help with her English vocabulary. During a previous visit to another Québec City restaurant years ago, I had to translate a tourist’s order into French because the customer at the next table spoke no French and the waitress spoke no English. 

• French speakers seem to resent tourists who switch back and forth between English and French. Many years ago, during my first visit to Montreal, I addressed a bus driver in French and then switched to English when I could not recall a French word. “French or English,” the driver shouted at me, in French. “One or the other.” I remember this exchange very well because this guy was the only rude Québécois I’ve ever met. 

• Québécois have a very fine ear for instantly identifying English speakers in a store, hotel, restaurant or museum. If you walk in speaking English to your companion, you probably will be greeted in English by the clerk. Ditto if you speak French poorly. If, like me, you speak French with a French-Canadian accent, you will be treated like a local, until you suddenly find yourself at a loss for a word or phrase. 

• Finally, a crisis does wonders to buff up your foreign-language skills. When our car needed a jump start in Québec City last week and we found ourselves dealing with a mechanic who spoke not a word of English, I was so preoccupied with getting the car started that my French fluency suddenly skyrocketed. Necessity is the mother of proficiency.