Montreal Local Custom Tips by Carmanah

It was Sunday afternoon and we got caught in the middle of a downpour. After a quick stop for ice cream, I was led to a park where a crowd had gathered around for the local phenomenon known as "Tam Tam" - an anything-goes dance-in-the-park where musicians, drummers and free spirits come to dance to the hypnotic beats. Even though it was raining, there was certainly quite a crowd. Apparently this has been happening at this park in Montreal for years. It happens every Sunday afternoon.

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Montreal, originally an Iroquois settlement called Hochelaga, was first visited by the French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1535. It wasn't until 1642 that the French began to settle the area. Montreal therefore developed naturally as a completely French-speaking city. Yet, over a 100 years later, in 1760, the English would acquire possession of the land and Montreal started to change. The biggest change was that English-speakers started to settle and change the fabric of the city. The once-French city was shifting into a bilingual city.

Through the following decades many English speakers moved to Montreal and this influenced the neighbourhoods. Some neighbourhoods became predominantly English-speaking while others became predominantly French-speaking.

Nowadays, Montreal is working hard to become a predominately French-speaking city again, but there are still neighbourhoods where native English-speakers (called Anglophones) are the majority.

The general rule of thumb is that rue St-Laurent, the road which divides Montreal into east and west, is the general division of Montreal's French and English speaking communities. Neighbourhoods which exist on the east side of St-Laurent, such as Outremont and the Plateau, are French-speaking. West of St-Laurent, neighbourhoods such as Westmount and NDG (Notre-Dame de Grace) is where you'll find more English speakers.

Of course, this is all general. There are indeed many francophones that live in the neighbourhoods west of St-Laurent, just as there are anglophones who live east of St-Laurent, however, anglophones that live east of St-Laurent are definitely becoming a shrinking minority.

Random side note: Montreal is pronounced "MUN-tree-all" by Anglophones, but the Francophone pronounciation is "Moe-ray-AL" (AL as in Albert).

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If the red octogon isn't obvious enough, "Arrêt" is the French word for "Stop".

Apparently the province of Quebec is the only place in the world where they have translated the word "Stop" on stop signs into French. That's saying something. In fact, though some may argue otherwise, I see the stop sign in Quebec as a bold political statement by francophone quebecers... and fair enough!

Quebec is a place where culture is synonymous with language. That is to say, they see themselves as a distinct society because of their French language. There is a fear that without fierce protection of the French language, English will ravish the province and French will wither way. The French language *is* Quebec, and to deny this is to deny the Quebecois people their culture. Without the French language, there is no Quebecois culture.

Some may have heard stories about the "language police", a body of government who enforce rules about how French and English should be displayed in public. For example, the French language must appear more dominant on signs than English. So French text might appear 2-3 if not 10 times as large on signs in Quebec than English... if there is even any English at all. After all, Quebec is the paradox in the so-called bilingual country of Canada. Quebec's provincial government only recognizes French as their official language.

Other examples of what you may see - an apostrophe followed by the letter "S" is an English phenomenon, not a French one, so "McDonald's" or "Tim Horton's" must legally change their names to satisfy the francophone public.

English speakers are known to laugh at this or take offence to this. Yet, if the roles were reversed - if the world was increasingly French-speaking and we were 9 million North American English speakers in a sea of 330 million French speakers, would we be translating our stop signs into our own language to preserve what self-identifying culture we had left?

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