In today's newsletter: A little book about language insecurity in my province, Quebec and Acadian representation in the localization of independent video games, a good article about neopronouns used by non-binary people in English, and more.

Happy Friday Reader,

Long live summer, and its chaotic serenity! I hope you're doing well since the last newsletter, and that you're keeping yourself well hydrated too.

⟶ A little housekeeping before we get started: in order to make the content of my December newsletter about effective writerly feedback on all kinds of texts easily googleable, I've republished the text on my blog!

Fighting Linguistice Insecurity in Quebec

With linguistic insecurity at the forefront of my mind for the past few years, I was eager to read Anne-Marie Beaudoin-Béguin's 2015 book, La langue rapaillée. I was already familiar with Beaudoin-Bégin's work via her very informative and irreverent Facebook page, L'insolente linguiste. (She also has a YouTube channel, but seems like she's on hiatus from social media lately...) The book tempted me, and I had a feeling I was going to like it. I was right!

Composed of essays of varying lengths (mostly short) whose arguments follow each other in a logical fashion, Beaudoin-Bégin’s book is perfect for short reading breaks punctuated by other tasks, in order to let all the information received marinate a bit. These try, and mostly succeed very well, to pierce through the arguments against the legitimacy of French as it is spoken by all sorts of francophones throughout the province (as the book’s focus is on Quebec French speakers).

The book pairs well with Mario Périard's L'ortographe, un carcan?, which I read this past spring. Both texts work to unravel the sociological, historical, political, and even personal reasons behind the structural forces seeking to prevent evolution and experimentation in the French language. In short (if I may simplify), it is often a matter of profound insecurity, which I would even characterize as systemic, that causes all sorts of complexes and defensiveness. Beaudoin-Bégin goes into great depth about the legitimacy of the colloquial register and explaining a few linguistic terms, such as prescriptive or descriptive language norms, and linguistic purism. Don't worry about the linguistic jargon: the book gives solid examples to illustrate each concept, in order to demonstrate how these influence conversations about "proper French" and contribute to a people's deeply-held insecurity about their own language.

If linguistic insecurity is on your mind, this is a book to check out!

A few other interesting links

• ​Some common mistakes and anglicisms when talking about video games in French, from professor Simon Dor's blog, which I saw shared on Twitter recently. The video game world, especially in North America, is dominated by English. But, as Le Monde reported in 2020, the video game world (especially among independent studios) is slowly starting to take note of its Quebec and Acadian audience, so trying to avoid these common mistakes is a good idea!
• Elizabeth Yuko discusses the neopronouns gaining popularity in English-speaking non-binary circles in the July issue of Rolling Stone. Note that "they" is not considered a neopronoun, as many experts in the English literary world can trace "singular they" back to Chaucer (circa 1375) according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Examples of neopronouns include ze/hir/zem, xe/xyr/xem, e/er/em, fae/faer/faem. The mainstream reaction to these neopronouns reminds me of the hostility of the French-speaking world to the poor (and frankly lukewarm, by comparison!) "iel." As Florence Ashley, one of Yuko's interviewees, shares:

• ​Dépanneur Nocturne by GP Lackey from Studio KO_OP. Okay, I fully admit that this has absolutely nothing to do with the language world, but this little game by the Montreal co-op is so dreamy, and I want to encourage especially those who rarely play video games to take a look at it. It's a short but engaging video game experience that celebrates the liminal and sometimes mysterious nature of very, very late runs to the dép!
• ​Did Twitter break YA? (Misshelved #6) from Nicole Brinkley's TinyLetter. This is a long yet intriguing read about the symbiotic (and sometimes disastrous) relationship between "Book Twitter" and the YA publishing industry in the U.S. and, I imagine, in Canada as well. While I don't agree with every point, the text definitively documents a phenomenon I've been observing for a long time, both online and offline, which the author calls "morally motivated networked harassment."

All right, that's all for now.

Take care of each other, take advantage of all the sun you can, and until next time!

Gersande

PS: Some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links. And a big warm thank you to Patricia Mereniuk for her help chasing down typos and wrangling overlong sentences!