We should not have to hack English algorithms to make French visible, writes Isabelle Bourgeault-Tassé.Babeth ALOY/Reuters
Isabelle Bourgeault-Tassé is a Franco-Ontarian writer.
Pardon my French, but the internet speaks English.
“A cultural blind spot has emerged where we often assume that the English internet is representative of the rest of the world,” wrote University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher Ryan McGrady last year for the BBC. Six years earlier, the World Economic Forum had declared that “the internet has a language-diversity problem. Native English speakers – around 5 per cent of the global population – probably don’t notice a difference between real life and online life, since more than half of the web is in their language.”
Oui.
English is never an accident. It’s always architecture. Algorithms favour it, platforms default to it, and most of the world’s digital content flows through it. And on social media – the most visible manifestation of that infrastructure – this bias becomes an everyday reality.
For Franco-Ontarians, particularly youth, it means navigating social-media platforms where English dominates and shapes the spaces in which they partake in their digital citizenship. In minority francophone communities, a recent Canadian Heritage report notes, young people must compete against a global tide of English content while also confronting the scarcity of regional francophone material. The result is a feedback loop – fewer francophone options lead to less engagement, which in turn leads the algorithm to bury non-English content, including French-language content, even deeper.
As francophones, we exist inside that algorithm every day. Yet, within its imbalance, lies something radically hopeful: The very architecture that marginalizes us also makes it possible for francophones to find one another.
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“Most of the internet is out of your reach, but the barrier isn’t just algorithms,” writes Mr. McGrady. “In another language, the same platforms turn into whole other worlds.”
Ah, que oui.
Across this emerging cybercontinent, francophones can see, hear and answer each other in real time. There is Wasiu, a Montreal-based artist who braids together the cultures, poutine and patois of his city into a meditation on the crossroads of identities. There’s also Franco-Michigander podcaster, journalist and academic Dr. Claire-Marie Brisson, who shines a light on the lives and experiences of Franco-Americans from her perch at Harvard University. And Mimi O’Bonsawin, an Abénaki and Franco-Ontarian artist, whose famous she-wolf howl resonates in a Franglais that feels deeply familiar to me. Ahdithya Visweswaran is a razor-sharp Franco-Albertan and Tamil-Canadian activist and podcaster, who turns his microphone toward language and forgotten francophone communities. And Jourdan Thibodeaux is a musician and crocodile hunter whose French du Jour series on social media shines a light on the history of Louisiana’s Cajun and Creole communities.
There’s also me, a Franco-Ontarian writer and curator of a "bilinguish" blog on Substack, writing in a language punctuated by English and French, as a way of forcing the political class to open its eyes to our communities.
We belong to a growing constellation of francophone influencers who narrate the diversity of our Francophonies – we are cultural interpreters restoring lines of connection, fractured by centuries of history marked by deportations, political and economic exile, colonization, migration, assimilation and acculturation.
Our mastery of English tricks the algorithm into listening, our content rising to its crest – carrying our voices even farther. What began as a strategy for survival has become something larger: A point of contact with the world, including a global Anglophonie, in an invitation to see our Francophonie not as folklore or a footnote, but as an essential part of the contemporary cultural experience of the Americas.
We should not have to hack English algorithms to make French visible.
But until governments, institutions and Big Tech catch up, it is francophone creators, journalists, writers, musicians, comedians, teachers and youth who sustain what the digital architecture won’t.
We are building an online universe in which we bend an Anglo-dominant internet toward an Amérique française that refuses to disappear. Ours is a community that insists on being heard, our unruly and unruled voices travelling across the continent, archiving an indelible trace of our passage through history in every tenacious Instagram reel and every immovable hashtag. We are making the algorithm take notice.