Listening to the CBC news Monday morning, I was reminded at how code-switching, or to alternate between languages in a single utterance, is so familiar elsewhere, but comparatively uncommon in the US media.
In this instance, the unfortunate news was a spike in COVID deaths in Quebec due to recent outbreaks in nursing homes. The Quebec premier speaking to the national media during the Prime Minister’s daily briefing noted that there were not enough health care workers to care for all of the critically ill people in the Say Ache Ess Ell Day and was requesting administrative and logistics support from the military in order to allow all trained healthcare staff to focus exclusively on patient-facing matters.
My pronunciation there was phonetic. (I’d put it in IPA but I don’t want to lose the non-linguists here) It’s been many years since I lived in Montreal now, but I was struck by how familiar it sounded to hear him say the acronym CHSLD in French.
You’re asking, if it’s an acronym, why would he said it in French? Well, because it’s an acronym for centre d’hebergement et de soins de longue durée, which translates roughly to “long term care facility” in US English, or “nursing home” in the vernacular. It’s not an acronym in English, and there’s no equivalent (we don’t say LCFC) so it wouldn’t make sense to say it in English.
The Saussurean connection between arbitrary configurations of sounds and their meanings gets weirder when you have false friends in a statement. Oops, I mean des faux amis. That’s a French term used in second-language education classes to identify common errors people make switching between English and French. Since something like 20% of English words come directly from French, and a bunch more come from the same Latinate root, there are a lot of words that look the same, but because of semantic drift don’t actually mean the same thing in both languages.
A personal favorite you can hear in the English media in Montreal is when someone’s “manifesting,” especially the “syndicates.” Of course, in French, a syndicat is a trade union, but if you’ve lived in Quebec your whole life speaking English and don’t talk about unions much, you may never have heard the word, but you know “syndicate” is a group of people. And unless you’re a university student, you maybe don’t hear about many demonstrations, but those union members, like postal workers and teachers? They manifest all the time!
Many native speakers of English, whether they’re native to Quebec or born elsewhere, refer to Quebec-specific organizations and places in English to their French acronyms, too. It’s actually possible that you can live in Quebec your whole life and not actually know what CHSLD or CLSC stands for (centre locale de services comunautaires, free local health clinics). It’s just a name. The name’s in French, and you don’t speak French? Doesn’t really matter, the sign’s right there. CLSC. You know what I’m talking about.
François Legault is fluent in both English and French, but being a pro politician and all, he probably doesn’t spend all that much time reading about nursing homes in English. In fact, because of the tradition of community health care in Quebec, which has roots in the Catholic church, you may not even associate the comparatively American concept of a “nursing home” to a CHSLD, since nursing homes can be entirely for-profit ventures owned by large corporations, but CHSLDs are community organizations based on social services, so it’s doubly removed. So I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it would actually be wrong to say “nursing home” here.