Quebec Culture & Language

Quebec produces culture out of proportion to its size, and it exports the parts that need no translation while keeping a complete domestic scene in French that most visitors never see.

Circus, invented here as an industry

Cirque du Soleil began with a group of street performers in Baie-Saint-Paul in the early 1980s and grew into the largest theatrical producer in the world. It also created an ecosystem: Montreal has a national circus school, a purpose-built circus quarter, and several other companies working in the form. The province effectively invented contemporary circus as a commercial art.

Theatre and film that travel

Robert Lepage’s company in Quebec City makes work staged from Tokyo to New York. In film, Denys Arcand won an Academy Award for The Barbarian Invasions, and Xavier Dolan was making internationally distributed features before he was twenty-five. The provincial funding system is the reason a market this size sustains any of it.

Chanson and the language question

Félix Leclerc and Gilles Vigneault made songs in the 1960s that became the vocabulary of a political movement, and the tradition runs through to the present in a domestic music industry with its own charts and awards. Montreal also produced Leonard Cohen, from the city’s English-speaking Jewish community — the other Quebec.

Joual on stage

When Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-sœurs opened in 1968 written in working-class Montreal speech rather than literary French, it caused a scandal and then changed what the language could be used for. Quebec literature dates its modern period from roughly there.

Refus global

A manifesto signed by sixteen artists in 1948 attacked the Church’s hold on Quebec intellectual life and cost most of them their careers. Its painters, Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle among them, are now the province’s most valuable, and the document is taught as the opening of the Quiet Revolution.

French is the official language of Quebec and the working language of the province. Roughly eight in ten residents speak it as a first language, and outside Montreal and the far west a visitor should assume it is the only language on offer.

Montreal is genuinely bilingual and service in the centre often opens with bonjour-hi, which is itself a small political controversy. Quebec City is not bilingual, though the tourist trade speaks English. In the Gaspé, the Saguenay and the Bas-Saint-Laurent, English is a rarity.

The French is not the French of France. The accent is older and broader, the vocabulary differs in daily use — a corner shop is a dépanneur, a car is a char, lunch is dîner and dinner is souper — and English loanwords are resisted in writing while appearing freely in speech. French-speaking visitors from Europe should expect to ask people to repeat themselves for the first day or two.

Opening in French matters more than speaking it well. Bonjour, then asking whether English is possible, changes the temperature of the exchange in a way that walking up in English does not.