So ai live in Montréal, Québec. That’s the colonial name of this place, of course, but also the name by which the vast majority of people who live around here know this place, and that’s almost certainly even more true for people who don’t live around here, who only know it from photos or maps or tourist guides. The indigenous name of this place, coming from Kanien’kéha, is «Tioh:tiàke» – and ai’m going to talk about that too, though not as much. Ai don’t think ai’d have that much to say about it, anyway, other than: if you live here and you didn’t know that name, you should LEARN IT. NOW!

But first, let’s discuss the colonial name a bit. For simplicity’s sake, ai am just going to talk about the name of the city specifically, but literally everything ai’m about to say applies to the name of the province as well. Basically, there is a widespread understanding that the proper way to write the name of Montréal in English is to do the opposite of what ai’ve been doing in the entirety of this post (and this blog) so far. Instead of including the accent aigu over the letter-ee [e, E], as ai do, you should drop it. Thus, according to the folks that have this understanding, the name of this city should be written “Montreal”.

How widespread is this understanding? It’s hard to say. Let’s imagine someone from Los Angeles goes on vacation to Montréal and writes a blog post about it. Or let’s imagine an English-language author from Mumbai writes an espionage novel that includes a short scene in Montréal for some reason. Or let’s imagine some teenager in Kamloops decides to text her best friend about how she wants to go university in Montréal after high school. Ai am going to guess that none of these people will use an accent aigu, but when it comes to these folks, ai don’t think any of them is likely to have a thought-out position on the proper orthography for this city’s English name. They either don’t care, or they’re using the style that they’re likely to see whenever they look at an atlas or read a tourist guide, or it’s a slight hassle to type that character and they figure the editor can catch it, or whatever. My point is this: while these people might not spell out Montréal’s name with the accent, they don’t necessarily think it absolutely should not be written out with the accent when writing in English.

But the understanding that, indeed, the name of Montréal simply cannot be written with an accent when writing in English is fairly widespread among Canadian anglophones that consider themselves literate and who pride themselves on the professionalism of their emails and the care they put into their spelling. In the areas of Ottawa and Montréal specifically, there are quite a few of these anglophones who, as a part of their job or perhaps as a part of other activities they are involved in, actually find themselves writing emails or other sorts of documents in French quite often; such folks may either use a French-language keyboard all the time, as ai do, or they may have a toggle on their desktop that allows them to switch between French mode and English mode at will.

This understanding is backed up by certain anglophone institutions, too, and the most conspicuous of these are those that have significant connections to Montréal, such as The Gazette (Montréal’s most widely circulated English-language newspaper) and McGill-Queen’s University Press. Both of these institutions produce a lot of material that is read by a lot of people, and the standards they set are bound to be seen as somewhat authoritative.

But me, personally? Ai just don’t get it. For me, at least on one level, this isn’t even really political; it’s simply a matter of what looks good. Let’s consider the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about Projet Montréal for a moment: “Projet Montréal is a municipal political party in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.” If you’re going to add an accent to the first word that needs an accent, why the fuck wouldn’t you add accents to the second and third words? Again, it would be one thing if you were simply lazy and didn’t feel like adding the accents at all, perhaps because your keyboard isn’t set up to make it easy, perhaps because just fuck it. Ai see this all the time in bombastic National Post editorials that talk about “Rene Levesque” or whatever. But if you’re going to take the time to put an accent in one part of the sentence, why not just be consistent?

“Because,” you might be saying, “the accent indicates whether you’re supposedly to pronounce it in an English way or in a French way.”

Okay, fair enough, at least if we’re talking about Montréal – because, of course, this doesn’t apply to the name of the province. Whereas the French pronunciation of Montréal’s name is markedly different from the English pronunciation (notwithstanding the way that the narrator pronounces the name of the city in Street Politics 101, lol), the standard English pronunciation of Québec’s name is identical to the French pronunciation – at least around these parts. Ai’ve heard some Americans say KWI-bek rather than the proper KAY-bek, but hey, they’re Americans!

So yes, in the aforementioned sentence from Wikipedia, the “Montréal” in “Projet Montréal” is supposed to be pronounced mon-RAY-al (in rough phonetic English) and the “Montreal” in “Montreal, Quebec, Canada” is supposed to be pronounced MUN-tree-all (in precise phonetic English). One could definitely argue that the orthographic difference helps to make the difference in pronunciation more clear. But personally, ai feel like it isn’t really necessary, and it leads to some unnecessary ugliness. Maybe this is just me, but when ai read “Montréal” (accented) in an article, ai still pronounce it in my mind like MUN-tree-all. If ai see it next to a word like «projet», ai probably pronounce it differently. This is almost certainly because ai am a pretty word-based person, and because ai know more than a rudimentary bit of French, but ai also don’t think this would be hard to learn for most people. Ai certainly don’t think it would be hard for those pedantic Canadian anglophones who are actually very bilingual but nevertheless insist on an accentless orthography in English.

Now ai’m obviously coming from a place of simply thinking it looks nicer with an accent; in fact, ai like accents in general. Ai think they spice up a sentence, visually speaking. There are some who may say that this aesthetic predilection of mine is not shared by all, and shouldn’t be taken into consideration for design choices, especially when it makes the language somewhat more complicated to read aloud. Such folks are generally in favour of a more phonetic language. But ai don’t buy that shit. If we’re going to try to make written English and spoken English less divergent, there are much more important places to start than the name of this city. Hell, ai would even argue that it’s not such a bad thing for us to be constantly reminded that things don’t necessarily correspond perfectly between text and speech, and that it’s actually fine to be familiar with words in writing without being familiar with how they are actually pronounced. If you know where Shenzhen is on a map, you know that – and can even talk about it – whether you know how to pronounce the name of that city or not.

Ai used the example of a Chinese city in the last paragraph because the rules of Hanyu pinyin, which are actually very consistent and exist in order to make it very easy to pronounce Chinese words, are nevertheless quite non-intuitive for English-speakers who don’t know yet know those rules. Ai happen to be familiar with the rules of this pinyin, so ai can be all smug if ai want to be, but ai don’t consider myself familiar with how Kanien’kéha orthography relates to Kanien’kéha pronunciation. Like, in the word «Kanien’kéha» itself, ai have no idea what the apostrophe is supposed to represent. Ai am sure that it wouldn’t be too hard to learn, but at the moment, ai’m clueless. Nor do ai have any sense of what the colon in «Tioh:tiàke» is supposed to represent pronunciation-wise. For all ai know, these characters could have no impact on pronunciation whatsoever, and are instead there much like the accent aigu in the way ai spell the name of Montréal in English – in other words, there for decoration only. (Ai suspect that this is not the case, but again, ai’m clueless.)

Besides, toponyms seem to be an area of language where there is particular divergence between pronunciation and orthography. Did you know that the name of Kiribati, a country in the Pacific Ocean, is pronounced kee-REE-bus? Assuming you were somewhere in Beaver Empire last October and you were having any decent political conversations at all, did you have any idea about how to properly pronounce the name of Elsipogtog until you heard someone say it out loud to you?

But of course, Montréal is not like these places. It is different. There is, in fact, a narrative that it is a bilingual city, a city that is equally “English” and “French”. Thus, it should have a bilingual name. But again, ai don’t buy this shit. The original colonial settlement was entirely French, and while it later came under British sovereignty, it would have originally been referred to exclusively as “Montréal” – except perhaps by Americans, Englishpeople, and Scots who simply didn’t care to add the accent aigu. After conquest, buildings were built in Montréal that had an accentless MONTREAL engraved on them somewhere, along with other words in English – and ai can only interpret this as a sort of dickishness on the part of anglophones against francophones. Things are very different now from what it was like here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, obviously, and the local power dynamic between francophone and anglophone has changed enormously. And yet this small, subtle dickishness is now seen as “only natural” by people who will add purely aesthetic accents elsewhere in sentences, as in: “Hey, can the two of us meet up at that cute little Parisian-style café in Old Montreal?”

Language is never natural. Language emerges from decisions that people make.

If we are to use a colonial name for this city at all – and, for the record, ai am open to the idea that we shouldn’t – then ai think it makes sense to just use a single name, to give up on this bilingual shit. The whole “two official languages” thing that the Liberals of the 1960s and ’70s implemented federation-wide is a vapid farce that, despite its total artificiality, has helped to keep the Canadian state together. We should therefore take objection to it.

The implication, for the name of Montréal, is that it doesn’t need two colonial names, one for each official language. It only has one colonial name. Whether you actually care to write that name out or not, ai don’t know. Again, if you’re lazy or you don’t have the right keyboard or you simply give no fucks, that’s all legit. Even if you buy my arguments but would like to keep writing out this city’s name without the accent because you think it’s funny to annoy people who give as much of a fuck about orthography as ai do, well, that’s legit too (though obviously you’re a brat). But if you DO care about writing it out properly, and you’re adding accents to things anyway, then you MAY AS FUCKING WELL add an accent to the name of the city. Ai kind of apply this logic to the Kanieh’kéha name as well. Both on my computer and on my phone, it’s pretty easy for me to add the accented letter (whether the ‘é’ or the ‘à’ in the words ai’ve used in this post), so ai’m gonna do it, cuz that’s how ai roll. Ai am less likely to go to the trouble, though, of using the right characters to spell a Polish or Vietnamese place name that has some intense diacritics going on, and that’s especially true if it’s for, like, a text message to a friend. Like, if ai want to speak about places like Łódź or Hải Phòng City and use the correct characters while doing so, ai pretty much need to copy and paste from Wikipedia.

In conclusion, please do you want, and please don’t feel like ai’m bossing you around. But if you’re making the decision to care about orthography, don’t be selective about it?