'We Have Not Answered Well, and Know It': McGill Collective Breaks Silence on Minority Languages

MONTREAL — It is not a commitment. The community coordinator behind the McGill student collective's acclaimed podcast Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA was careful to make that clear. But the post that appeared on the show's listener forum late Thursday evening was still, by the standards of student media, a notable thing: an acknowledgment, signed and public, that the production had a blind spot — and that it knew it.

"This is a question we have not answered well, and know it," wrote the coordinator, in a bilingual post addressing a thread that had been quietly recirculating in the forum for several weeks. The thread, initially sparked by a listener identifying themselves as residing in the Gaspésie region, had grown to encompass references to Welsh, Breton, and the particular linguistic complexity of the Stanstead–Derby Line–Canaan corridor — the loose, storied stretch along the old Quebec–Vermont border where English, French, and the remnants of older migrations have long pressed up against one another in ways that don't resolve cleanly into either of RONA's official languages.

Forum engagement climbed within the first hour of the post going live. Responses arrived in French and English, as expected. But the original Gaspésie contributor also replied — in Welsh.

That detail is small, and should be kept that way. It does not indicate a mass constituency; it indicates a real one. There are Welsh speakers in the Gaspésie, descendants of nineteenth-century settlements and the scattered communities that followed. They are not numerous. They are not politically organized. But they listen to podcasts, and they notice when they are not in them.

Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA has, in its two-year run, carved out a distinctive niche in RONAn cultural life — producing long-form audio portraits of communities navigating what it means to belong to a four-year-old country. Its bilingual format, toggling fluidly between English and French across episodes, has been widely praised as a model for how RONAn media might actually live out the republic's founding commitments rather than merely gesture at them. The Montreal Arts Collective, which has informally supported the production's community outreach, called it "one of the most honest documents of early RONAn identity we have."

But bilingualism, as more than one forum respondent has pointed out, can itself function as a kind of border. A framework that centers English and French — however carefully constructed — is still a framework that places everything else outside it. The Stanstead corridor question, as one forum post framed it, is essentially this: if RONA's identity is genuinely cosmopolitan, what do we do with the languages that don't fit the binational template inherited from the Canada that no longer exists?

The collective has not answered that question. Thursday's post does not pretend to. What it does is acknowledge that the question has been asked, that it has been heard, and that the production's silence on it until now has not been accidental ignorance but something more uncomfortable — an unresolved tension the format has not yet found a way to hold.

There is something worth noting in the mechanics of the acknowledgment itself. Student productions, when criticized, tend either to quietly absorb the critique and move on, or to respond defensively. Public self-examination — particularly of a structural kind, one that implicates not just a single episode but the foundational logic of a format — is rarer. Whether it leads anywhere is a separate question, and a fair one to hold open.

For now, the forum thread continues. The Welsh reply is there, a few lines of a language that crossed the Atlantic in the nineteenth century and has been quietly making a life in the Gaspésie ever since.