Dictation-bound

They begin announcing the winners, starting with the junior categories from the non-French-speaking countries: Ethiopia, China, Romania, Egypt, and the United States all take home honours. Then come the francophones — the usual suspects: Belgium, Switzerland, France. Some are hoping the top prize will stay in Quebec, but it goes instead to a fifty-three-year-old French teacher from Hazebrouck in northern France: Bruno Dewaele, a bookish, white-haired man wearing a seersucker suit with a yellow shirt and green tie. Earlier in the day, his cockiness had made him stand out from the others. While everyone else agonized about the mistakes they thought they’d made, he told anyone who would listen that the jury had mistakenly hyphenated “porte à faux,” meaning “to be in an unstable or ambiguous situation.” A double champion in France, Dewaele laughed off today’s Dictée. “I would have liked it to be harder, so it would be more selective,” he said. “It’s a very nice text, but honestly I can’t say I found it difficult.”

Dewaele was now the champion, with the first perfect score in the history of the Dictée des Amériques. His prize? A new set of dictionaries and a lifetime ban on competing in Quebec City — a prohibition intended to ensure that the same linguistic heavyweights don’t dominate the contest year after year.

My own ordeal isn’t over. My dictéeis to be corrected by Guilloton, who created most of the linguistic traps in the text. She pronounces my first sentence “excellent — zero mistakes,” but goes on to mark up my exam booklet with neat red marks. I’ve misspelled “essayists” and “rap” and “disinherited.” I’ve hyphenated “postmodern.” I’ve missed accents and plurals and agreements between nouns and verbs. My final score: thirty-three mistakes. If I were a competitor, my score would easily be at the bottom. She calls it an “honourable result,” but I think she’s being charitable.

When I first signed up for the Dictée, I was prepared for a dry, joyless exercise of the kind I recalled from my school days, and which my own children now have to endure. Instead, I found people who took genuine pleasure in the French language, who saw its plethora of grammatical rules not as a burden but rather as a game to be enjoyed, and who would readily travel halfway around the world to be with others like them. Their enthusiasm was infectious — and I may well return next year.