I've noticed that Francophones and Anglophones seem to have different relationships with their mother tongues. When I ask an Anglophone to read something and tell me about the meaning, they tell me the message they get from it first, and reach for a dictionary second. When I ask a Francophone the same thing, they reach for the Robert first and only give me the instinctive vibe they get from the text if I specifically ask them to do so. It's like Francophones are more prescriptive and Anglophones are more descriptive - for them, the language is more a set of rules that needs to be followed, and for us it's more a tool to make do what we want.
I always find it interesting when I see this characteristic manifested in the broader culture, outside my usual niche of the language professions. For example, I just saw an ad on TV for Desjardins, with the motto "conjuguer avoirs et êtres".
We could never have that in English! Could you imagine, a financial institution with a motto that's a play on words of grammatical rules? But in French, it's appropriate and decently witty!
My first thought is that this is a sign of anti-intellectualism in our culture - any mention of grammar would be seen as pretentious or elitist or ridiculously fussy - but I think it's more complicated than that. We seriously do have different relationships with our languages. Verb conjugation is more important in French because there are more things that need to happen there and more ways of getting it wrong (and, more importantly, of getting it wrong in a way that changes the meaning), while spelling is more important in English. That's why they have dictées while we have spelling bees.
That's an area for further research, if it hasn't been done yet (watch me once again fall into the trap of blogging without googling). Do the language mistakes that are most likely to change meaning affect/reflect the people's relationship with their language?
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