"I Don't Understand You": A History Of Linguistic Diversity In Colonial North America: Part Two, Canada.

The French came to North America for profit, just like the Spanish did, but they were not interested in a complicated venture of mining and looking for cities made of gold.  For one, there were no grand empires denoting any sort of mineral wealth in these parts, whether they landed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Florida and the Carolinas, or later along the Gulf Coast.  They did, however, find that if they demonstrated that they could play nice with the locals, the locals would offer them the other fruits of the interior, namely pelts.  Later on, settlers would come, just as they did down in Mexico, and just like what happened in Mexico, the settlers found they had an easier time of living when the neighbors were at peace.  Colonial policy thus took on a role of negotiator rather than exterminator, at least as long as the other side was willing to talk.  French settlement, however, also never really took off with the intention or effect of transforming the entire land; New France was a thing mostly of the river ways.  The backcountry was reserved for commerce and exploration.

This is not to say that the French language did not spread there.  Here, as in Mexico, missionary efforts found that the people were more responsive to their own language in which abstract concepts could better be disseminated.  The lust for Latin which was becoming part and parcel of Counter-Reformation Catholicism only played a ritual role here in a land of very different patterns of belief.  What's more, the Jesuits were the primary troops deployed in the effort, and the teaching philosophy of Matteo Ricci had now been widely introduced into efforts to spread the faith through the Society beyond the tried and trusted techniques favored by the other orders back in Europe.  On the commercial front, the voyageurs and fur-traders agreed that business went smoother when they decided to learn the language of the market rather than induct the other side into the fine art of French.  The imposition of French language and culture never became a legal mandate by the authorities, if for no other reason than it never had to be imposed; things just worked too smoothly the way they had since the 16th century.  That and, well, as had been noted above, the spread of French anything into the heart of the continent was a mix of small scale settlement and large scale commercial operations.

Thus instead of coming as a conquering force, the French world entered the scene as a new partner at best, and a manipulator at worst.  Since the primary efforts, if not goal, of the settlers was commerce, French expanded far faster than any other European language did anywhere in the New World.  By the end of their first century in Canada, Frenchmen could be heard speaking their native tongue from the Atlantic north to the treelines and across the breadth of the land to the Rockies, perhaps as far south as Tejas.  Remember how they got along well with the locals for the most part?  Well, they got a long really well, and those exploring and trading men often adopted both the lifestyle and even family of the folks they came across.  Just as was the case in Mexico, where two worlds met in a marriage and produced a new people born of both, the Mestizos, here were born the Metis.  As was the case in Mexico, these children did, and still do, speak the languages of both parents.  In the American westward expansion of the 19th century, frontiersmen and settlers would often encounter French speakers, the Firstborn among them, as far afield as Utah and Idaho.  More on the Metis in another post.

Public Domain.  The painting, The Trapper's Bride, is a work by Alfred Jacob Miller, an American artist who had a fondness of the subject matter of the northwestern frontier.  While a lot of 19th and early 20th century historical paintings have an extreme air of Romantic illusion to them, this one seems very real.  You have a bunch of the locals amused by the French trappers who are positively enraptured by their rugged and free way of life.  That, and a pretty face.

Unlike in Mexico, fortunes changed hands for French-speakers relatively soon after foundations had been laid for a permanent presence there.  The English won sovereignty of the land after they chose it as a victory prize in the French and Indian War.  Something remarkable happened, though, that had never before occurred in Anglo-French rivalry: tolerance.  In 1763, when Quebec, Montreal, Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans had to officially raise the British flag, everyone expected that deportations would occur, language and customs suppressed for those who remained, and the place would start looking a lot more New York than New France.  This is what went down when the Acadians were forcibly removed from Nova Scotia not even a year prior, and back in Britain cultural transformation of a defeated foe had long been in vogue, especially in Ireland, and more memorably in 1745 in the Scottish Highlands.  Just as what had happened in Mexico, however, something in the individualistic, idealistic North American air got to someone and made them say no.

His name was Guy Carleton, and he is the savior of my people's culture. 

Come by next post for more!