Drimonis: You can't stop 'Go Habs Go' or ‘Bonjour-Hi'

Montreal Gazette

09-05-2025

Hockey playoffs may be over for the Canadiens — and what an unexpected thrill they provided our city! — but the 'Go Habs Go' controversy lingers. Here's my view from the cheap seats.
Every time we have another language kerfuffle in Quebec — more specifically, debates over linguistic purism, like when the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) decides to meddle with popular sports chants — I think of Greece.
Let me explain.
When Greece regained its independence in 1821 after 400 years of Ottoman occupation, certain scholars decided the naturally evolved colloquial language of the people — referred to as Demotic — wasn't up to snuff. They wanted to 'cleanse' the language from Turkish influences and all foreign words and introduced a new, mostly contrived language, referred to as Katharevousa, which loosely means 'purified'. Their goal was to make Modern Greek closer to Ancient Greek by gradually eliminating all outside influences from the common parlance.
For a while, Greeks spoke one language and studied another in school. The Greek Orthodox Church still uses Katharevousa. But today, Greeks speak, create and live in Modern Greek, which is mostly the evolution of the Demotic language of the people.
I won't bore you with the many historical, political and cultural reasons why this linguistic experiment ultimately failed. Suffice it to say, I have long looked at the attempt as a cautionary tale. You can only socially engineer so many things in society — and language, which evolves naturally, isn't usually one of them.
Despite the Greek government's best efforts, people continued to speak the common everyday vernacular, which was shaped organically over the centuries and included many Turkish, Italian and French words. Expressions and words survive because languages are living entities. They reflect and absorb the lived experiences and circumstances of the people using them.
While I'm not suggesting a direct comparison between this linguistic experiment with the language battles we routinely see fought here, there are lessons to be learned about what I think is often pointless, needlessly divisive and bound-to-fail government overzealousness to extract or ban certain words or expressions that evolved organically throughout Quebec and multilingual Montreal.
A society won't suddenly adopt a new language, or in Quebec's case, stop using words and anglicisms that gradually developed over centuries of coexistence, just because government officials say so.
When I see attempts to 'purify' Québécois French from English words and expressions — by now, every bit the language's own, the same way many English-speaking Quebecers say dep and guichet — or when politicians and pundits argue franglais threatens the viability of the French language, or when some mock and disparage common Québécois expressions or words not used in France, judging them to be inferior French, I chuckle at the futility of it all.
Language evolves naturally. You can create offices that help guide people and offer alternatives. Sometimes those words catch on. Sometimes they don't. But there is also beauty in Québécois French and French-Canadian expressions, and certainly in the way Montrealers speak to one another, innately using expressions like 'Bonjour-Hi!' — expressions that only truly resonate here, born from our common lived reality.
When Montrealers scream 'Go Habs Go!' in unison or shout 'Olé, Olé, Olé!' (a term whose Spanish origins have nothing to do with hockey and yet have everything to do with hockey in Quebec now) a committee of scholars or bureaucrats didn't come together to decide on their usage. We did. Everyday Montrealers of all languages and backgrounds, in love with our hockey team, started the chants. And they stuck.
Franglais is natural. Expressions that use both of Canada's official languages are natural. Québécois expressions completely removed from France's linguistic reality are natural.
What evolves — and is embraced — organically is what ultimately survives. Long after a solitary complaint to the OQLF tried to tell us otherwise.