Emile was from L'anse au Canards on the Port au Port Peninsula. The Days Inn in Stephenville has a restaurant named Emile's Pub.
I came across this thread and have to get in on the discussion because I live on the french Newfoundland doorstep. A lot of the english in the Bay St. George/Port au Port area of NL is heavily influenced by french, and as a result, the intonation and rhythm of speech gets all over the place. After a heated class discussion in university I was asked a few times if I was french. My hometown brands itself as "The Acadian Village" and puts the "Bienvenue À" ahead of "Welcome to" on all publications, and uses french on the top of our town crest.
I don't think it's really doom and gloom for Newfoundland French. There are schools that teach entirely in French in places like Cap St. George and La Grand'Terre, at École Notre-Dame-Du-Cap and École Sainte-Anne respectively. In comparrison, there is only one english school serving the area and only ingrades K-8. They have access to several french radio stations and a bureau of "Le Gaboteur" newspaper operates out of the area. Obviously there are challenges, but you can certainly conduct daily business in french in that area, and any job posting that comes up for that region is posted in french. In fact, I worked at Canadian Tire here about 5 years ago and served people en français somewhat regularly. A lot of signage is bilingual and they still hold a french folk festival annually. Much of the ''study'' done by academics who come in and observe very little french usage is a result of a couple of factors:
1) Politeness - often these people came in and did not divulge their true purpose of visiting the community in order to get a more natural evaluation, something that wouldn't really be allowed today. Anyway, in the company of an outsider people will try to make that person feel more welcome, so they would often switch to english so as to not be rude.
2) Even with a thick french accent, the francophones sounded the same as native english speakers in Stephenville. As I said, the french accent is still prevalent, even today.
The biggest issues that were faced by francophone Newfoundlanders came with the USAF opening a base in Stephenville in 1941. That caused a lot of emigration into town from the peninsula and a lot of people anglicised their names and learned english to get work. Benoit » Bennett, Aucoin » O'Quinn, Leblanc » White, and so on. But on the peninsula, the french surnames still exist.
The idea that government prevented french from being taught in schools doesn't carry near as much weight once you look at the historical record. Churches controlled education in the early 20th century, and we had denominational schooling until 1997. Education was conducted in french. When the air force was buying out land in 1940, the people who were losing their homes in Stephenville (francophone community at the time) were being given far less than those in St. John's. They were given the opportunity to write letters to the the proper officials and request a hearing to have the price re-evaluated. All the letters that were sent were exact copies of each other, all written by 1 person, the only person in the community who was fluent in english. The rest were french or illiterate. One would expect that the Port au Port peninsula would be even more heavily francophone due to isolation. This indicates that education in english was severaly limited. After confederation english education became much more normal, but by the late 70s the push for francophone education was picking up again. The 50s and 60s were absolutely the dark ages of les francophones de Terre-Neuve.
And that is my essay, thanks for reading!
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Thanks to have share that little tresor!
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