Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Nationalism, Identity and Popular Culture 69
difference from other parts of the French circuit), and the immigrant populations
with their various connections to French. While immigrants from
Mali, Senegal and Gabon may fi nd a space for their French, Africans from
non-Francophone nations, as Ibrahim (1999, 2008) points out in the Franco-
Ontarian context, may often identify with Black English as their African
identities are stripped away in favor of an identifi cation as Black. The large
Haitian population, meanwhile, forges a new relationship between
Haitian Creole and the other languages of Montreal. Sarkar and Allen
(2007: 122) cite an interview with Montreal’s Impossible: ‘Le style montréalais
. . . c’est la seule place où t’as un mélange culturel comme ça, que t’as
un mélange des langues comme ça, que ça soit l’anglais, créole, pis le français,
mais un français quand même québécois’ (Impossible, 2004/06/04)
(‘Montreal style . . . is the only place where you have a cultural mix like
that, where you have a mixture of languages like that, whether it’s English,
[Haitian] Creole, then French, but all the same a Quebec French’. Sarkar
and Allen’s translation). This reported mix of Quebec French, English and
Creole is unique in certain ways; it does not seem to be the case, however,
that Montreal is so distinctive in supporting this level of diversity.
While at one level this mixing of language is a refl ection of the codemixing
on Montreal streets, in other ways it is more than this. According
to J. Kyll of Muzion ‘en général, on chante, on rap comme on parle’ (‘in
general, we sing, we rap the way we speak’) (Sarkar & Allen, 2007: 122),
and yet we also need to see such language use as productive as well as
refl ective of local realities. As Rampton (1995, 2006) has observed in urban
contexts in the United Kingdom, such language use often involves ‘crossing’
or the use of languages in which the speakers are not fl uent. As
another of Sarkar and Allen’s participants explained, although he was not
himself Haitian, he was often identifi ed as such and felt free to speak and
use Creole. Rappers in this study claim that rather than such language
mixes alienating listeners, they enable listeners to relate to diversity in
new ways. Thus, a line like ‘Où est-ce que les patnais vont chiller ce soir?’
(‘Where is the gang going to chill [hang out] tonight?’ which contains the
Haitian Creole term patnai for ‘good friend’) might now be heard from
young Montrealers of many backgrounds. According to Sarkar (2009: 147),
this new generation of urban Quebecers has integrated words from both
Haitian ( popo ‘police’, kob ‘cash’, ti-moun ‘kid’, and kget ‘a swearword’)
and Jamaican Creole ( ganja ‘marijuana’, spliff ‘joint’, skettel ‘girl, loose
woman’, and rude bwoy ‘aggressive youth’) into their everyday language
and rap, whatever their ethnic background.
Given these mixes, labels such as ‘Francophone’ need to be applied
with caution to such circles of fl ow. While on one level these music scenes
are connected by their postcolonial use of French, this French is also widely
divergent and, as with English, cannot be easily assumed to be one entity.
According to Glissant (1997: 119) ‘there are several French languages