Dictation-bound

Pivot’s show, Les Dicos d’Or (The Golden Dictionaries), was on the air for twenty years and came to an end only last November. During that time, it sparked a renewed interest in the dictée in countless schools, as well as a resurgence of spelling clubs and national competitions across the francophone world. There was even an effort to transplant the contest to other cultures — like the Arabic dictée that was attempted, and quickly abandoned, in Lebanon. “There were too many obstacles,” says Pivot. “It was either literary Arabic, and a lot of people didn’t know how to write it, or there were different ways of spelling the same words.”

Pivot’s departure from the scene left the Dictée des Amériques as the main international French spelling championship. It is well situated in Quebec, a province that considers itself a standard-bearer of French culture in the world. “You mustn’t forget that the Québécois are in the middle of an ocean of anglophones,” says Pivot. “For the Québécois, the survival of their language is almost the survival of Quebec itself.”

Back in the Red Room, it’s time to start the Dictée. Every year, the text is composed by a different Quebec writer. This time organizers have made a surprising choice: Luck Mervil, a Haitian-born Montreal pop star better known for hosting a reality-TV show than for his literary output. “I’m a lover of the language,” he had told me earlier. “I read three books a week.”

Mervil takes his place on a bar stool at the front of the room and begins reading slowly: “Combien d’années faudra-t-il pour faire comprendre aux habitants de cette planète que la vie est éphémère?” (How many years will it take to make the inhabitants of this planet understand that life is ephemeral?) So far, so good; the first sentence doesn’t seem too difficult. But it gets progressively harder: junior contestants write only the first part, while participants in the most competitive category — French-language professionals — complete the entire Dictée.

Before long, I’m running into trouble. The text, which has an antiglobalization theme, seems to revolve around a character called “Saint Gord” and some “insatiable materialists” and “hierarchical heralds” who are preventing the dawn of an “era of justice” (or is that an “air of justice”? — impossible to tell; they sound alike in French). The text is designed to be a linguistic minefield, full of tricky grammar and spelling traps to ensnare the unwary. Beads of sweat start to form on my forehead and quickly multiply as I struggle over phrases like “the manatees do not lament” and “autarchic politics and hegemonic economics.” Two hundred and eighty-seven words later, I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s over.

After a coffee break, the next phase begins: the corrections. The dictée is projected onto a giant screen, and members of the jury go through it sentence by sentence, highlighting and explaining the pitfalls. You can practically hear gasps of horror from the contestants as they learn that “credo” is always spelled as though singular, that “ill-intentioned” is written as one word, and that “Saint Gord” is actually the Senegalese poet and independence leader Leopold Senghor.

Some of the jury members are from the Office québécois de la langue française, the province’s infamous language police. “Is that the Canadian version of the Academie française?” asks Mark. “They leap out from behind the bushes if you use an infinitive the wrong way and drag you off to language prison?” Mark is looking pleased with himself. “Actually, it didn’t seem like a very hard dictée until you got to the last part, where there were a bunch of African words I’m not aware of,” he says. He recalls a much tougher dictation he wrote six years earlier at the hands of another Haitian-Canadian writer, Dany Laferrière. “He did this whole thing on a disease called kwashiorkor and problems in Haiti. And I knew nothing. Nothing.”

Although French isn’t an especially difficult language to learn to speak, mastering its written form requires knowledge of complex grammatical rules. Nouns come in two genders, masculine and feminine, which must be memorized, and the end of almost any word that modifies a noun must reflect its gender. But because the endings are unpronounced, the gender and therefore the spelling of many words can be unclear during a dictée. And since French also has innumerable homophones, as well as grammatical exceptions for such things as words of foreign origin, you can’t be sure what kind of word you’ve just heard, much less how to spell it. “You go, ‘Oh my god,’” says Mark. “‘Is it being used as an adjective? Is it being used as an adverb? Do I make it agree?’ You change everything back and forth five or six times, and then you get down the stairs and the person sitting next to you while you’re having your coffee goes, ‘You thought it was an adjective, huh? You’re screwed.’”

We’ve finished writing the dictée, but it’s only mid-morning and there’s still a long day ahead. There will be an impossibly difficult multiple-choice quiz and, if the first dictée produces a deadlock, a second dictée to serve as a tiebreaker. There will be more coffee breaks, a buffet lunch, and some banter about whether the Europeans are using performance-enhancing drugs. And Luck Mervil will sing a musical version of the dictée on his guitar.

It’s late afternoon and the jury has finally finished marking 109 exam papers. Before the cameras start rolling again, organizers warn the contestants not to pick up their crystal trophies from the wrong end and to make sure to smile if they win, “even if it’s just third place. And if you’re grand champion, let’s see an explosion of joy.”