Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia
Joual
Pronounced jwal and derived from the French word cheval (horse).
If anything has changed the theatre in this country, French and English, it was the slow introduction into French-language theatres of joual, or Quebec working-class dialect. Gently, with Gratien Gélinas ' works, and then explosively, with Michel Tremblay 's, joual was finally accepted as one of the ways Quebec society expressed itself. The introduction of joual also enabled the introduction into theatre (at the time dangerously close to becoming a purely élitist form) of other dialects of the country from Michael Cook 's and Codco 's Newfoundland dialects to the Montreal anglo working class accents of David Fennario 's plays.
Joual is considered by some to be a horrific bastardization of French but over and over again writers in Quebec have proven that any dialect can be rendered lyrical. Perhaps the most historic (but certainly not the first) use of joual was in the Théâtre du Rideau Vert production of Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-soeurs , which had joual not only presented as the natural idiom of these characters but also shown in the form of quasi-musical oratorio (in the Bingo segment). From Michel Garneau 's joual Shakespeare to Jean Barbeau 's joual fantasies (loaded with puns; even the titles!), joual has found a place in the theatre and is no longer greeted with the dismay it once caused (indeed, Belles Soeurs was refused a subsidy to travel abroad because of its joual). The language has been popularized world-wide through songs (notably of Robert Charlebois and Pauline Julien ), poetry, film and television (however, in France certain joual TV programs and films are subtitled).
It is important to note that joual is not simply a dialect as it is often a political statement. In Tremblay's Hosanna , for instance, the transvestite's speech is as much at question as his sexual orientation. Is he Canadian? French? English? Québécois? The language seems to resolve the argument.
The point of joual being a symbol of the Quebec class structure was brought home by Eloi de Grandmont 's brilliant translation of Shaw's Pygmalion (the source of the musical My Fair Lady). In de Grandmont's work, the flower girl is enslaved by her joual (in the original, cockney), and needs to speak well to join polite society. The discussion of joual being a definition of Quebec poverty has been raised elsewhere but rarely with such brio.
Where joual becomes problematic is in the translation of joual texts to English in Canada. John Van Burek and Bill Glassco , in their translations of the Tremblay works, skated around this by keeping many of the swearwords in French (joual uses religious swearing - tabarnac/tabarnacle, ostie /host, câlice /chalice-unlike other Frenches which use sexual cursing). A more fascinating approach was seen in a Scottish adaptation of Belles Soeurs called Guid Sisters which directly translated the working-class French into Scottish working class dialect. It worked beautifully and a production of Guid Sisters played in Montreal at Centaur Theatre in 1994 (where Belles Soeurs, premiered in 1968, had never been performed before in English).
Last updated 2009-04-09
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