Bilingual winks and bilingual wordplay in Montreal's linguistic landscape

Abstract

In Québec, legislation regulates the language of public and commercial signage. As intended, this has transformed the linguistic landscape (LL) of Montreal, which looks more French than just three decades ago. But if we stop looking and actually listen to the city's soundscape, what is clear is that Montreal is a much more bilingual and multilingual city with a population increasingly able to read signs both in English and in French. Interestingly, in the Montreal LL can be found a number of commercial signs that are nothing less than wry “bilingual winks” that circumvent legislation, sometimes with quite wicked skill, and play with French and English. These bilingual winks are clearly intended for a population with the language skills to catch the wink and can be interpreted as manifestations of the increasing number of complex language repertoires, but also of a bilingual aesthetic that revels in disrupting and claiming space. It would also seem, however, that while a certain amount of covert bilingual creativity has been inspired by the legal constraints imposed in Québec, bilingual wordplay has simply found ways of creeping into the LL, despite the politics of language and legislation.

Translanguaging and Linguistic Landscapes: A Study of Manitoban Schoolscapes

“…Since then, worldwide, many researchers have chosen to conduct linguistic landscape studies that focus on the interaction between minority and majority languages in public spaces (Blackwood, 2011;Cenoz & Gorter, 2006;Curtin, 2008;Edelman, 2014). Other Canadian studies tend to focus on the relationship between English and French in minority and majority settings (Cormier, 2015;Gade, 2003;Gilbert, 2010;Lamarre, 2014). A common finding in the aforementioned studies was that the minority language was underrepresented even in territories where it was widely spoken by the population.…”

English in French Commercial Advertising: Simultaneity, bivalency, and language boundaries

“…Following Lamarre's (: 137) application of Sommer's () bilingual aesthetics to the Montréal landscape, the testing of this relationship may indicate a desire to ‘irritate the state’. We might add that the status quo is an additional target, since many individuals’ imagination of language has been shaped by the same state narrative at which advertisers like to poke fun.…”

“…We might add that the status quo is an additional target, since many individuals’ imagination of language has been shaped by the same state narrative at which advertisers like to poke fun. Such ‘slyness of contestation’ (Lamarre, : 139) is certainly the intended effect of Duck Me , whose signage plays with linguistic decorum and propriety as well as with the notional boundaries of the languages themselves. As such, it can be argued that although the Toubon Law represents an unrealistic view both of language and language governance, it also represents an opportunity for many multilingual adverts to stand‐out, providing the normative backcloth of bounded French onto which advertisers project an alternative linguistic unboundedness.…”

“…As Blommaert and Backus (), Makoni and Pennycook (), and others remind us, languages are best understood as socially constructed phenomena shaped by the repertoires of users, rather than as fixed collections of words and grammars. Such a view may – particularly for those outside language scholarship – require a leap of faith, since, to echo Lamarre's (: 148) words, viewing language mixing in this way asks us to ‘escape from under the weight’ of language norms. Necessarily, and as others have shown (Hornikx et al., ; Luna & Peracchio, ; Malinowski, ; Vingron, Gullifer, Hamill, Leimgruber, & Titone, ), further study of the ways normative definitions of bounded languages perpetuate requires some exploration of the interpretations of texts and signs.…”

“…Considering the notion of ‘bilingual winks’ introduced by Mettewie et al. (; see also Lamarre, ), which describes the covert use of English features within ostensibly ‘French’ signs, one might identify this as a form of ‘monolingual wink’. In Mettewie and colleagues’ discussions, a multilingual construction is embedded within an otherwise monolingual word, such as the (French) meaning ‘cutie pie’ and the (English) realisation of / ʃuː/ within the shoe shop name chouchou .…”