Well put. But the current CAQ government believes that the only way to strengthen French is to suppress English. And then there was the unfortunate Pastagate affair that even made it into the US media.
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â As many as 21 European languages are potentially at risk of âdigital extinctionâ](http://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers/press-release), according to research.â
It is hard to overstate the suffocating weight of English in non English speaking western cultures. It began slowly with cinema and music, accelerated with TV, accelerated even more with the internet and has turned into an avalanche with smartphones.
There is a reason things have been changing faster and faster since the seventies, and I assure you it is not because of protective measures. Thatâs causation works the other way round, and it is a losing battle regardless.
French has not been the exclusive language in Quebec since 1760. Alrhough the nationalists wonât admit it but English has been spoken in Quebec for over 250 years. A significant part of Montreal was built by anglophones.
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One example is James McGill (at least if Scottish descent counts as âanglophoneâ).
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I enjoy watching some French shows. They do speak crazy fast lol.
@TomSrOfBoston Iâm confused, is this supposed to be an answer to my post? Where did I imply that Quebec was ever exclusively French speaking? I have lived in Montreal and am well aware of its bilingual history.
I am trying to raise awareness about the foundation of the fears that underly those desperate measures. I know that the cultural pressure of English and its impact is inconceivable for English speaking Americans or even Anglos living in Quebec - as in, they literally cannot conceive it unless someone explains. I know, because Ive had those conversations before, including in Montreal.
I am not pretending that the measures taken to boost French are well founded or even useful in the medium term. French isnât doomed, but QuĂ©bĂ©cois French probably is.
Until then, ill conceived measures will negatively impact the Anglo community in Montreal (including the large Jewish presence) and that is very sad, too. They wonât change the long term outcome, though.
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I wrote that in response to the situation in Iceland that was posted earlier. In continental European countries, English has no historical place. While In Quebec, English, as a minority language, goes back centuries.
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Ah., now I get it. Of course, the countries of continental Europe (which, btw, emphatically do not include Iceland) are pretty unique in the world in that the English language only rarely has a historical presence, though discussing the reasons why it does in so many others may lead perilously close to the dreaded âsettler-colonialistâ discourse. Of course, none of the three languages in competition in Northern America are indigenous languages, about which no one appears to talk about at all anymore. Should everyone learn the indigenous language of their particular northern American region?
Iceland and the situation of Icelandic is of course only an example of the pressures languages other than English are under in the digital age, which is why I included the quote with the link to a study about 21 European languages under digital pressure.
I really posted it in response (not technically, I find) to @shawbridgeâs comment musing about whether the solution couldnât be bilingual education for everyone else from an early age, as European countries are doing, and whether countries such as Sweden notice an erosion of their language due to it.
The answer is yes, they absolutely do, and it is precisely the fact that everyone is bilingual (just as every French Canadian in Montreal I ever met) which accelerates the erosion.
Because the English speakers, as @shawbridge also noted, do not bother - because they do not have to.
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Notice, also, that the question of who is a minority is as much subject to arbitrary delineations as who has a historical presence.
@Tigerle, what I observe with my limited sample of Canadiana is that Anglophones who stayed in Quebec have become fluent in French and the university grads in Ontario and Alberta that we know speak passable French as they need to be fluent or passable for jobs in government or NGOs (and a lot of the kids we know have headed toward those jobs). One is a professor at a French speaking university in Montreal and another is a professor in Ontario.
Anglophones from my generation who donât live in Quebec generally donât speak French â same is true for those who moved out of Montreal.
My perception from our visits to our house in the Laurentians is that the quality of peopleâs English has declined over the last 25 years. This is likely different from Montreal proper.
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I agree that the government fears that bilingualism is actually a step toward the loss of French.
However, there is a certain irony in the fact that francophone politicians who speak English (Legault, and historically Parizeau, Bouchard) seem to want to limit the access of their constituents to achieve the same. The most recent law by the Legault government works to extend Bill 101 â which limited the access of francophones and immigrants to English education at the grade school and high school level â by now restricting access of these groups to English junior colleges (the required step between high school and university) in hopes of restricting their ability to attend English universities.
The government used to think that after grade school and elementary school the language was established in the person, so there was no danger of losing it, but their new position seems to be that it is not oneâs education till age 17 in French that will preserve the language, but oneâs ongoing inability to function in any other language that is key.
Edited to clarify that the above paragraph is what the government thinks, not what I think.
I assume they have been able to have a conversation or do business with you. That is really no more than what is required for a second language speaker to prosper, or for a community to prosper.
The second question (for the Québécois government, concerned about the survival of the French speaking community, really the foremost question) which I assume you cannot speak to, though wish you would if you can, is whether the use and standard of French as a first language, both in personal and professional contexts, has improved.
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the standard required in a professional context depends on the professional context. True bilingualism, ie equal facility in both languages, in all contexts, without a noticeable accent, no mispronunciations or subtle oddities in idioms is actually rare. For people without a natural talent in learning languages it is not achievable, and it gets harder the later your exposure is.
Nothing is ânaturalâ about children of immigrants learning both languages in childhood (whether the second language is present inside or outside the home or both) to a high level. They do have to work twice as hard, and if there is even a small learning disability in language reception or production, it affects them worse.
Educators have also noticed that it is not enough to âjustâ go to school or even preschool if the instructional language is not your first language, or just to offer language learning support at the early stages. Whenever there is an uptick in standards required, ie from elementary school to middle school or from high school to college, many of these children suddenly notice that what was sufficient to keep up and do well in the instructional language at the lower level suddenly isnât, and support has to start again to raise the standard.
I have read about a very interesting study, and hope to find the Economist article about it so I can cite) which analysed hundreds of thousands of internet questionnaires and determined that there is a window for language acquisition that closes at around 17 years of age (how hard and tight, again, would depend on your natural talent for language acquisition, so please no anecdotes about âbut I was 18 and learned tagalog in college just fineâ).
So restricting access to English instruction before that age would seriously hamper French speakersâ functioning in English, full stop. But I understand that is not what is happening.
Putting French speakers in English education before that age would hamper their ability to function in French at a high level required to use it as a first language in all contexts, beyond the family or personal ties. Putting allophone immigrants in English education will ensure they will never function in French at all (against, with the exception of the talented).
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It is one of those cases in which not everyone can have it all. As long as native Anglo Canadians have access to English language instruction, at least minority protection is ensured. Immigrants will have to accept French instruction.
And still, Franco-Canadians are fighting a losing battle and know it. It will probably get worse.
This was my experience growing up in a multilingual household. My motherâs mother tongue is Spanish but I never became fluent because she was bilingual and I grew up in an English speaking country. She would speak to us in Spanish and we would answer her in English. If I were to move to a predominantly Spanish speaking country where I was forced to speak the language Iâm sure I would become fluent in short order but not having had the necessity of doing so means that I currently am not. The same applies to my acquisition of French. Iâm sure I could become fluent if I had to but baring necessity thatâs unlikely to occur.
Ontario seems to be emulating Quebec in underfunding universities.
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@tigerle, I think you may be misinterpreting my descriptions. On my last trip, several of the folks in stores / restaurants that we spoke to did not speak enough English to do the job if we were only English-speaking. We tried to ask questions about items on the menu and could only get explanations in French. ShawWife is anglophone and her Quebecois is rusty but functional and I can understand a fair bit from my fairly bad public HS courses in French. So, communication was not a problem. Similarly, we had an issue with our car a few years back in Granby QC or someplace near there. With her rusty Quebecois, ShawWife was unable to communicate or understand. Fortunately, ShawD, who had completed a pretty good set of French classes in private middle and high schools, had no difficulty conversing with the mechanics or later with guys who were trimming trees on our lot who spoke no English at all. So, no. When I was surprised at the decline in English fluency, I was talking about situations in which it would have been very difficult to function without French. [I think the tree trimmer was older so he probably never spoke English and is less relevant to my observation].
My recollection is that being anglophone is not sufficient to get primary education in English. i think you have to demonstrate that your parents received an English education in Quebec or something odd like that to qualify for English first education in QC. I canât remember the exact rules and they may have change but they were actually remarkably restrictive.
On the main issue of protecting French, I think it is fully within the prerogatives of the province given the history. I admit that the economies of scale afforded by the internet make it difficult for languages with a small user base (Iceland has a population significantly smaller than the population of Long Beach, CA and has less than half the population of Charlotte, NC) are going to make it hard for such languages to remain relevant from an economic perspective. French, on the other hand, has a large user base. But, Quebec is different from France. ShawWife and I were at an artists colony with an apparently well-known and highly regarded Quebecois author. He said publishers in France donât publish work in Quebecois (more likely to publish work from Francophone Africa). He said Quebecois is like 17th century French, with very odd expressions to a Parisian ear (sort of like listening to people in stores in Olde Shakespearean English). His writing is all supported by government grants as the market for books by Quebecois authors is very small. So, the QC government is supporting not French per se, but a very peculiar regional dialect of French.
I donât argue against their right to do so, but was just thinking about the economic consequences of decreasing English fluency in a world which is going in the other direction. I always thought that had Quebec separated back in the day, they might have felt the need to start putting up signs in English for American businesses and tourists.
Because of global economies of scale made very dramatic by the internet and Large Language Models, you are probably right that preserving Quebecois is a losing battle. I remember Canadian content hour on Canadian radio stations â repeat songs by Gordon Lightfoot, Annie Murray, Joni Mitchell, etc. â that faded away. The alternative was to do what the French government did when they blocked the purchase of DailyMotion by Yahoo. Other than winning political points at home, this act accomplished two things: 1) it doomed DailyMotion to being a minor player unable to compete with Youtube; and 2) it told French entrepreneurs that if they wanted to make it big in technology, they had to move their companies from France (whether to the US or maybe Berlin or Stockholm).
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I did interpret what youâre wrote to mean that peopleâs English had become worse. Apparently some people simply barely speak English at all in the Laurentians. Thatâs not good for making money from American tourists, but it is good for QuĂ©bĂ©cois as such.
Also, you are still talking from an anglophone perspective. You couldnât function without French. They were functioning perfectly well in QuĂ©bĂ©cois, and potentially ordering a dish that you didnât like or not getting your car fixed was a you problem. And what happened was what the QuĂ©bĂ©cois government wants to happen - elevating QuĂ©bĂ©cois to a language that anglophones have to learn to function, not the other way round.
You must have travelled in Europe. You do realise that European countries do not bother to put up signs to help out American tourists who do not speak the local language? Itâs not that they arenât perfectly happy to have American tourists and sell them hotel rooms, meals and tickets, and many get lots and lots of them, but they see no need to turn their countries bilingual for them.
One of the most important things one has to do in order to save a language that is in competition with another is to make sure both languages are equally respected. If you have a bilingual situation and one speaker thinks they are speaking a language, but the other speaker is only speaking an âvery peculiar regional dialectâ - whoo boy, thereâs a long way the QuĂ©bĂ©cois government has to go to protect its linguistic and cultural heritage from those speakers of that mangled mixture of 16th century English and Irish dialects from the South.
When we travelled in Italy a decade ago most signs on transportation and in tourist sites were bilingual: Italian and English. On a train from Pisa to Florence there were two young men having a conversation. One was Pisan, the other was Argentinian. I understood their conversation because they were speaking in their common language: English.
I donât think I was asking for signs to be in English. Per your question, Iâve been lucky to have a job that causes me to work all over the world (six continents thus far, nothing in Antarctica) and I have also been fortunate to have travelled to many more countries, including some where no one spoke English outside of a very small number in big cities. Generally speaking, English is the language in which folks from different countries speak to each other. This is true all over Europe. I recall a conversation between a German and a Japanese person in Croatia. It took place in English
I take your point that forcing non-French speakers to need to speak French is the underlying purpose of the policy. I have no problem with that. My original comment was that this was not the best choice from an economic standpoint given that its largest trading partner (and a significant part of the rest of the world) does business in English. I would also probably have a hard time if my car broke down in Brazil outside of Sao Paulo. But, in contrast to Quebec, the US buys 15% of Brazilian exports (compared to 72% of Quebecâs exports). I think you are arguing that Quebec is making the right choice from a cultural perspective even it it comes at an economic cost.
Just to be clear, I was not the person who described Quebecois as a peculiar regional dialect. It was the Quebecois novelist telling me how the French or at least publishers in Paris see Quebecois. If he is right, a significant problem for Quebecois is that the larger French-speaking universe does not care about it, so that it does not benefit nearly enough from the economies of scale available to the French language world.