Canada, a bilingual country, but not so much? On November 20, Canadian football player Marc-Antoine Dequoy took advantage of his team’s title in the Gray Cup (the championship) to share his frustration on the relative place of the French language in his sport. Dequoy was then furious to see that no text displayed on the stadium screens was translated into our language. “They never believed in us, man. You look everywhere and it’s written in English, he declared at the microphone of RDS. But you know what? Keep it your English. Because we’re going to take this cut, then we’re going to bring it back to Montreal, we’re going to bring it back to Quebec. We’re going to take her home.”
If there was only one sentence to remember, it would be this “keep your English”, both an inexhaustible source of memes over the past ten days and a generator of numerous debates and reactions since the prominence of the 29 year old Quebecer. Quebec MMA fighter Olivier Aubin-Mercier thus took up the formula of his compatriot after his last victory.
Quebec’s minister of the French language welcomes the player’s anger
The debate is such that it ends up being commented on by the Quebec Minister of the French Language, Jean-François Roberge. “The Canadian Football League is part of a country that wants to be bilingual, that calls itself bilingual. We must respect Quebecers, we must respect the French language. I think that the Quebec player, Mr. Dequoy, did well to express himself as he did, and to denounce what needed to be denounced. »
Marc-Antoine Dequoy as a new symbol of the conservation of French linguistic heritage in North America? Calms you. Invited on TV sets, the player does not claim any political message. “The protection of the French language, […] I see it as a social issue. It was the emotion of the moment. »