Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante wants local merchants to end their use of the colloquial, bilingual greeting “bonjour-hi.”
“People come to Montreal knowing it’s a French-speaking city,” Plante said in response to a question from reporters on Tuesday.
“So while we want to welcome everyone, of course. We want to do good business and everything, of course; “We should be proud and we should encourage people to just say ‘bonjour’.”
The mayor’s statements came immediately after a new study by the Office Québécois de la Langue Française, the province’s language watchdog, about how buyers are received.
The report shows that the use of French-only greetings by Montreal merchants is on the decline, representing around 71 per cent in 2023. This represents a drop of around 13 per cent from 2010, when around 84 percent of business owners and employees welcomed it. customers only in French.
The office, or OQLF, also found that bilingual greetings in French and English such as “bonjour-hi” are increasing in Montreal stores. The figure jumped to 11.9 percent last year, a stark contrast to about four percent in 2010.
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Quebec’s French language minister did not mince words in addressing the findings.
“It sends the wrong message that we are a bilingual nation. We are not,” said Jean-François Roberge. “In Quebec, French is the only official language.”
The study showed that bilingual reception in other urban areas of Quebec is not as popular as in Montreal. In Laval, across from Montreal on the city’s north shore, it was used nine percent of the time.
In Gatineau, next to Ottawa, greetings in French and English accounted for 7.4 per cent. Meanwhile, business owners welcomed shoppers in both languages on 6.4 per cent of visits to Quebec City.
The mayor of Montreal says she has never been served by a local merchant who does not speak French, but she acknowledged that this happens.
If a store employee is not fluent in French, Plante said business owners should make sure they have access to the programs they need to learn the language.
“We are in Quebec. The only official language is French,” Plante said.
– with files from Franca Mignacca of Global News and The Canadian Press
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
