LANGUAGE IS AT THE HEART OF just about everything in the independence-minded province of Quebec, as the French singer Charles Aznavour found out last October when he tried to sing a few songs in English during a concert here and nearly got booed off the stage.
When the insulted Quebecers shouted ''en Francais!'' at Mr. Aznavour, he argued that another French-speaking performer, Celine Dion, is permitted to sing there in English. The crowd was unmoved. In the second half of his show, he used only French.
A few weeks later Ms. Dion -- who is French Canadian -- took the same stage at the Molson Center for one of her last concerts of the year. She performed her first two songs in a booming French that wowed the crowd. Then she belted out two in English, a language she didn't speak a word of until she was 18, and the applause was even greater.
By the concert's end, she had the hard-nosed audience of teen-agers, housewives and a few elderly people singing, in English, ''I'm everything I am, because you loved me.'' The line comes from her hit song ''Because You Loved Me,'' which is in contention for record of the year at Wednesday's Grammy Awards ceremony at Madison Square Garden (where she'll also be appearing in concert on April 12). Ms. Dion has also been nominated for three other Grammys, including album and pop album of the year, and best female pop performance.
Ms. Dion is no favorite of many music critics. They claim that her singing is as passionless as her voice is big and that her songs, which she does not write, are more likely to become next year's prom hit than to break new ground.
But here before the hometown crowd, a sentiment that could seem softhearted on the radio seemed to carry authentic feeling. And as Ms. Dion scooped up an armful of cuddly stuffed frogs brought to the stage by her fans, it truly seemed that the audience did have a lot to do with her amazing climb from singing in her father's bar not far from here as a girl to international superstardom at 28.
''They were the first ones to support me and I trust them,'' Ms. Dion said after the concert. ''I believe in them. They're a big part of my life.'' Dressed in a plain white bathrobe and huge slippers shaped like black cows, the petite blond with large expressive eyes seemed relieved to be at home in Montreal after a year in which she toured the world. That same year her album ''Falling Into You'' sold 20 million copies worldwide, one of the biggest sellers in an otherwise grim year for the record industry.
But with her mother and many of her 13 brothers and sisters in the audience, Ms. Dion admitted that she had been a bit anxious, even though she has performed and recorded professionally since she was 13.
''Before I go on, there's a little bit of nervousness,'' she said. ''I don't know if it's possible to say nervousness in English. In French we say nervosite, which I think means stress a little bit.''
While her current success makes any roughness in her English seem quaint, she says the decision to record in English was so sensitive that some of the more political members of her team quit in protest. ''We lost a few of our friends at the beginning of my career because they thought it was stupid for me to record in English and they didn't believe in it,'' she said.
She only wanted to be able to perform in English, she insisted, because she remembered listening to her siblings singing Beatles and Stevie Wonder songs as they rehearsed new shows. Her parents had formed a Quebec version of the Trapp family, but only Celine, the youngest, ever made it to the big time.
That success was in great part because of her five-octave voice and a single-minded dedication that drove her to drop out of school at 14 so she could spend more time singing. Also instrumental was a chance encounter with a Montreal producer named Rene Angelil, a man with both vision and a taste for taking risks, who had also guided the career of Ginette Reno, another child star.
One day in 1981 he received a demonstration tape from Ms. Dion's older brother Michel of his 12-year-old sister singing ''It Was Only a Dream,'' written by her mother, Therese. ''I listened to it right away, and I couldn't believe it,'' said Mr. Angelil, 54, who remains Ms. Dion's manager and two years ago became her husband. He called her in to audition.
''She wasn't the cutest 12-year-old.'' She had a problem with her teeth and she was very shy, but her eyes were incredible.'' And she could sing.
When the song was released the next year, it became a No. 1 hit in French Canada and later in France. Other hits in French followed. Then, when she turned 18, and decided she had grown up, she cut her hair, got a more adult wardrobe and learned to speak English with a three-month crash course at Berlitz.
''At the beginning, because I was a Francophone from Quebec, it was more difficult for me to be played on the radio in the English part of Canada than it was in the United States,'' she said. ''But when it started to work for me in the United States, well, they kind of had no choice.''
Polly Anthony, the president of Ms. Dion's label, 550 Music, a subsidiary of Sony, said her march toward the top of the charts had been remarkable because it had been so steady and so quick. In the United States alone, her first English album sold a million copies, her second two million and her third three million. Her fourth, ''Falling Into You,'' which spent almost an entire year in Billboard magazine's top five, is now at eight million in the United States.
''The timing was right for a pure pop artist,'' said Chuck Taylor, radio editor of Billboard. ''But there's a lot more to her success than just timing and luck.''
Mr. Taylor also attributed part of Celine Dion's good fortune to a general weariness with 60's style rock-and-roll, which he said had helped open radio airwaves for ballads and pop music.
Ms. Dion is often compared to Mariah Carey for her style and Barbra Streisand for her voice. Her latest CD in French, called simply ''The French Album,'' is a simple production, filled with soulful songs and a few recordings that hint at contemporary jazz. But on ''Falling Into You,'' almost nothing is simple.
The slickly produced torch song ''It's All Coming Back to Me Now,'' written by Jim Steinman, starts with a dramatic piano chord swept by howling winds and builds from there for seven and a half minutes. Sexy ballads like the title cut and a remake of ''All by Myself,'' which lets Ms. Dion show off her powerful voice, deal with recaptured love and longing.
Her voice was attraction enough to get the producer Phil Spector to begin a rare recording session in 1994. But the session ended in a disastrous clash of views. Mr. Spector would not discuss the incident but last spring he told Entertainment Weekly that he had quit the project because Ms. Dion's team ''simply wanted to record 'hits' even if they were contrived and repugnant.'' Mr. Angelil says Mr. Spector mistakenly thought he would produce an entire album when there was only time to do three songs. The album they were working on with Mr. Spector became ''Falling Into You.''
Still, Ms. Dion said she was growing weary of just being a voice, of running to the studio to lay a track of lyrics someone else wrote on top of music that is already recorded. She says she is eager to take more control of her career, which until now has been under the strong hand of Mr. Angelil.
''Sometimes I have to read the liner notes to find out who played guitar on my record, who played percussion,'' she said. ''It doesn't mean that what we've done is no good, but the last French album I recorded in one week, the English album in two weeks. I'd like to take the time to record an album.''
She keeps a blue-and-white Fender Stratocaster in her dressing room, and her fingernails have been pared back by practice sessions on the guitar. She wants to continue recording in both French and English, but she also wants to learn Spanish and maybe Japanese (one of her songs was No. 1 in Japan last year).
Any artist can be overexposed, however, and with her many concerts, talk show appearances, even the Celine Dion phone cards advertised in ''Falling Into You,'' Ms. Dion may have come dangerously close to her limit. Mr. Angelil says that is why they are going to take a year off, starting in May. They are building a mansion in Florida, a state that has long been a favorite among French Canadians. They are also planning to start a family, though not a family anywhere near as large as her parents'.
