As amateur collectors of regional art, my wife and I are always eager to meet the artists who created the paintings we love. One such canvas is a winter scene of a Vermont sugar shack, by Denis Chassé. On one of our recent trips across the state, we passed a gallery in Chester advertising his name. We stopped. Imagine our surprise when DEN-EE SHAH-SAY extended his hand with a big smile and said, “Hi, I’m Dennis CHASS-ee.”
At first we thought it was a joke. How could you take a lovely French name, Chassé, and mangle it into CHASS-ee? But he was serious.
Unfortunately, such bastardization of language is all too common in the Twin State area, especially in Vermont (which derives from the French for “Green Mountains”).
Consider. Barre is BEAR-ee, not BAHR. Montpelier, the state capital, is pronounced Mont-PILL-yer instead of MON-PUH-LI-YAY, despite the fact that the sign for Montpelier on the interstate reads Bienvenue. And, perhaps most bizarre of all, the lovely little town of Calais, in Washington County, is known to locals as KALL-is, not KAH-LAY.
I confess that my sensitivity to this issue is heightened by the fact that my wife, the estimable Catharine Randall, was a distinguished professor of French (nine books and scores of scholarly articles) before accompanying me to Dartmouth. She also possesses a flawless Parisian accent. One of our favorite destinations is Québec City, where, Catharine claims, because Québec is a linguistic island, the Québecois speak a version of French virtually unaltered from the 16th century when French Canada was settled (except for some unfortunate cross-pollination with its American neighbor).
I claim no linguistic expertise myself. My attempts to learn French in college were catastrophic and unavailing (although I did learn that no syllable in French is emphasized over the others). And one of the great paradoxes of having married a French professor is that my anxiety dreams about college French classes persisted well into my 50s. When we visit Québec, my vocabulary consists of bonjour, pardon and désolé, and when I do try to construct a sentence, my listeners typically think I’m inquiring about the provenance of some 14th-century Moroccan antique.
But I’ve picked up a bit of the vocabulary over the years. And although my pronunciation is far from perfect, I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of the language.
Vermont’s state capital was named after the city in France (although Vermont for some reason dropped one of the Ls) by Revolutionary War veterans grateful for France’s assistance during the American Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette visited Montpelier in 1825 on his triumphal tour of the United States half a century after the Revolution.
Given this history, why do Vermonters routinely massacre the French language? Some of it, of course, is simple indifference or longstanding habit; everybody, it seems, pronounces Calais KALL-is, and those who know better (including my wife) are reluctant to appear arrogant by using correct pronunciation or by correcting others.
But there are other factors as well. The first French Catholic priest settled in Burlington in 1851, and French Canadians began to migrate to New England, including the Twin States, after the Civil War, lured by the demand for labor in new industries. By the 1890 census — legislation passed in Québec in 1875 aimed at repatriating French Canadians was an abysmal failure — French Canadians made up nearly 10 percent of the population in Vermont and over 12 percent in New Hampshire. While most of the immigrants settled in mill towns, an 1898 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics noted that, “In some parts of Vermont one hears complaint of the extent to which they have taken possession of old and run-down farms, and established themselves where before scarce any foreigners could be found.” French Canadian immigrants, however, often encountered prejudice and discrimination in the 19th century, in part because they were willing to work for lower wages. In the face of such discrimination, many sought to assimilate as quickly as possible and even to anglicize the pronunciation of their names: Beauchesne, Boisvert, Delarue, Gagnon, Daigle, Hubert, Chassé.
Sadly, the United States has a long and sorry history of cultural imperialism. Time and again we have sought to impose conformity, whether it be slaves from Africa forced to convert to Christianity, immigrants told to anglicize their names, or Native American children shipped off to Indian schools, where they were forced to cut their hair and wear European clothes and were punished if they spoke their native languages. The bumper sticker “Welcome to America. Now Speak English,” ubiquitous in some parts of the country, speaks volumes.
I have little doubt that many, even most, children of French Canadian heritage were forbidden to speak French in Vermont public schools, and it’s not much of a stretch to suppose that they picked up a sense of shame about their heritage and even their names.
But times are changing in North America. In Canada, indigenous peoples, known as First Nations, are asserting their rights, and Québec retains a French identity distinct from Anglophone Canada. Despite the xenophobia of the campaign just past, many Americans are embracing the diversity that has always been the hallmark of this nation. According to a recent article in TheNew York Times, more and more Hispanic baseball players are asking that accent marks be added to their uniforms — Pérez, Fernández, Cedeño — a far cry from the days when Roberto Clemente fought with management of the Pittsburgh Pirates because he refused to be known as “Bobby.”
In the American West, the assertion of Native American rights and newfound confidence in opposing such boondoggles as the Dakota pipeline coincides with a recovery of tribal traditions and identity, including languages. In Alaska, many parishes of the Orthodox Church, whose clergy have long defended Alaska Natives against cultural imperialism, conduct liturgies in native languages, and the citizens of Barrow recently voted to change the name of the nation’s northernmost city back to its Inupiaq name, Utqiagvik, a transition that took effect at the beginning of December.
At this historical moment, when the president-elect rode into office in part because of his anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, the assertion or reassertion of cultural and linguistic identity could very well be construed as an act of defiance. E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one — is a glorious sentiment, one that captures the American spirit; despite our differences — ethnic, racial, political, ideological — we are one people, an ideal that, at the moment, is being sorely tested. But E Pluribus Unum does not mean, and has never meant, that everyone becomes the same, that individuals or groups must elide their identity into some amorphous, homogeneous whole. We are stronger in the aggregate with a firm grasp of our identity as individuals and communities.
If, as the literary critics tell us, language determines reality, it’s time to take back language. This is a moment to exalt regional distinctives and reassert historical and cultural particularities, an act of defiance worthy of this Brave Little State.
Where to begin? I’m not suggesting that Vermonters will spontaneously break into flawless French accents and immediately begin ordering croissants without pronouncing the R, much less the S. But we could start with KAH-LAY; that’s pretty straightforward. Then maybe we could move on to MON-PUH-LI-YAY, which would require a bit more practice, and then, with mounting confidence, we could take on Vurr-JENNS and Cham-PLAYNE.
My suggestion is that we ask Vermont Public Radio to take up the challenge and show the way. Surely Mitch Wertlieb and his VPR colleagues could be persuaded to abandon Mont-PILL-yer in favor of a less egregious pronunciation of the state’s capital. In time, with repetition, a more authentic rendering of the state’s heritage and character would become part of the fabric of everyday life and conversation.
That would not only be aesthetically pleasing, it would be a powerful, blue-state political statement in the age of Donald Trump, a subversive protest against the Trump juggernaut of homogeneity.
Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion and director of the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.