Is Multilingual Rap Eroding Canada’s French Language?
Recently a Quebec arts foundation required the Francophone rap group Dead Obies to give back an $18,000 grant they’d been awarded to record their newest album. The problem? A word count determined that the group had stirred too much English into their distinctive multilingual lyrics, falling short of the rule that 70 percent of the content be in French. Here’s an example from the first track of their album Gesamtkunswerk:
Dough to get
I got more shows to rip
Dead-O on the road again, c’est mon tour de get
Sous le spotlight, viens donc voir le dopest set
We just gettin’ started et pis t’es captivated
Looking at me now, thinking: «How’d he made it?»
J’suis tellement plus about being felt que famous
Que même moi, j’sais plus what the hell my name is
Dead Obies is used to catching, suggested that such language practices were “suicidal” and would likely result in the formation of a “mediocre creole” incomprehensible to speakers of proper French or English. These comments are part of a long history of Quebecers’ concerns over preserving the province’s Francophone identity, with many language rules enacted to serve as dikes to keep English from flooding in on all sides and drowning the French language.
