An Air Canada passenger complained after a flight attendant did not serve him in French. Jean-Pierre Beaudoin was told he had to take another flight if he wanted a French speaker. Air Canada told French-speaking Canadian television station TVA Nouvelles that two of its three attendants on the flight could speak French.
An Air Canada passenger filed a complaint with language authorities in Canada after a flight attendant was unable to serve him in French on a flight departing from Quebec. Jean-Pierre Beaudoin told French-language Canadian television station TVA Nouvelles that he was flying in business class last month from Quebec City to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when a flight attendant who spoke only English served him.
He asked for a bilingual flight attendant to provide him with French. Beaudoin told TVA Nouvelles that the crew member spoke to a colleague, then said in English, ‘Sir, this is my area. You have the right to leave the plane or to accept that I will serve you in English.”
He said a man, who was either an Air Canada employee or an airport agent, got on the plane and told him that either an English-speaking attendant would serve him or that he had to leave the plane. “It made my blood boil,” Beaudoin said. “I thought, This is Quebec. The flight is departing from Quebec. It wasn’t an option for me to leave the plane.”
Beaudoin, who speaks French and English, told TVA that he decided to stay on the plane and only respond in French when the crew spoke to him in English. He described the act of rebellion as a “matter of principle.”
He told the outlet that after the flight he filed a complaint with Quebec’s Office for the use of French Language (L’Office québécois de la langue française). Beaudoin said he did not complain to Air Canada because he did not trust their process, but instead referred the matter to the language authorities.
Air Canada is subject to Canada’s Official Languages Act, which gives equal status to English and French. The airline was fined $15,700 in 2019 after a passenger complained that some signs on a domestic flight were only in English, BBC reported.
In a statement to TVA nouvelles, an Air Canada representative said two of the flight’s three cabin crew members could speak French. “Service in both official languages was available and offered. In this regard, it is false to claim that the only solution was to ask him to leave the aircraft since the French-speaking staff members were able and available to serve Mr. Beaudoin in French.”
For many years, heated debates about language have existed within Canada, between French and English speakers, but also among French speakers from different latitudes. The debate sometimes centers around differences in pronunciation and word choice. Historian of Quebec French at Laval University in Quebec City, Claude Poirier, studied documents from the 17th century to see if the spelling at the time would give clues to their pronunciation. He found that a lawyer from west-central France “spelled “perdre” (to lose) as “pardre”, which is closer to how some people in Quebec still pronounce the word”. Moreover, “devoir” (must) was spelled “devour” and pronounced “devou-air”, which is how older people in Quebec still pronounce it nowadays.
In the middle of the 18th century, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, a French explorer, wrote that “the Canadian accent is as pure as that of the Parisians”. So, what changed? Or rather how come Canada conserved this while France changed?
In 1759 France lost the colony to the British Empire, so the connections between France and New France were broken, with many nobles returning to Europe. Then, the French revolution further isolated Canada form France.
Poirier’s research revealed that during the time the two Frances were disconnected, scholars in France started standardizing the language’s grammar and pronunciation. “The Quebecois conserved the French language as it was spoken in the ancien régime,” said Poirier.
While the French in France changed, the one in Quebec stayed the same. By 1830, when French people started traveling to Quebec again, the differences were already major. So much so that French diplomat and philosopher Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, wrote to his mother that “Canada raises our curiosity. The French nation has been preserved here. As a result, one can observe the customs and the language spoken during Louis XIV’s reign. It seems more like Old France lives on in Canada, and that it is our country which is the new one.”
