It seemed common in Italy to see French and German as well as Italian and English on some signs and restaurant menus in tourist areas.
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Thanks for that article @TomSrOfBoston. Itâs a far more concerning situation than I was aware. I had heard this year of financial issues at Guelph, Queenâs, and York resulting in program cuts, but it would appear that itâs more widespread than that. While there probably is some administrative bloat that can be taken out of the sector (especially at Queenâs) I worry what too deep of cuts will mean regarding being able to provide needed services to students and what impacts it may have on graduate funding packages. Thereâs also got to be a limit to how reliant universities can become on international tuition to offset funding shortfalls before it becomes unsustainable. Recently thereâs been a lot of push back on international student numbers due to the housing crunch that many communities are facing and the Federal government is starting to introduce new measures designed to bring the numbers down. They are also taking the Ontario government to task for allowing community colleges to enter into agreements with for profit partners in so called âcredit millsâ that predominantly target and exploit international students.
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@shawbridge, @TomSrOfBoston Major tourist sites have signs in English, French, often Japanese, by now Chinese, too. This is not meant to cater for a linguistic minority in the province or an overwhelming linguistic majority in the country, actually the continent. They are putting them up for the world. Note I wrote major tourist sites. We are talking Florence and Pisa vs the Laurentians here.
I am not exactly arguing that the Québécois government is doing the right thing from a cultural standpoint. I do not know enough about their exact linguistic policies to go that far - but yes, it is about the trade off between what is best from an economic standpoint versus what is best from an economic standpoint.
Arguably, economically it might be best if everyone on the North American continent switched to English, period. Turning Quebec into a complete economic backwater would not help it culturally either - people will just move to regions who are doing better, and lose their language there. One of the most destructive blows to Irish Gaelic was the potato famine and the subsequent waves of emigration from the hardest hit regions in the south and west which were also the Gaeltacht. Itâs all about trade offs, very few absolute rights or wrongs here, but emotions that English speakers in the English speaking world have no chance to understand unless they are explained.
Being multilingual myself, I once thought was the biggest proponent of bilingual edition and raising bilingual kids. I find myself shocked that my own multilingual children are switching to English for concepts that they have encountered on the internet and struggle to express in their native language.
Oh, for the times when bilingual signs were thought to be the biggest deal!
Edited to add - lest anyone thinks I am throwing shade on the Laurentians! Iâve been there. Very beautiful area! But not exactly comparable in global touristic significance to FlorenceâŠ
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@tigerle, per your earlier link, I get a regular email from something called SuperHuman AI, which is devoted to developments in AI (who would have guessed given the name).
"There are 7,000 languages spoken today, but 90% of websites are written in only 10, according to the Atlantic. As the world continues to embrace AI, researchers are trying to figure out what that will mean for the thousands of languages that arenât prominent on the internet.
âŠ
There are three big consequences:
- It limits who can access AI platforms: A simple task like typing a question into ChatGPT gets much trickier if youâre using a language that the chatbot canât understand
- Results might be inaccurate or culturally insensitive, lacking the nuances that make each language unique
- English-centric models might incentivize people to abandon their native language and instead use one thatâs more common online."
I expect the world to run on English and Chinese at some point. I suppose it will also depend on politics a bit, but eventually the ease of alphabetic scripts will prevail. Spanish will stand a chance. Hindi/Urdu maybe, by sheer force of numbers.
Itâs exciting and upsetting in equal measure.
As someone who has a bit of an inkling of what goes on. The issue in Quebec has long been that the Quebec govt takes some of the incoming tuition from all Quebec into a fund and allocates it to the Quebec universities under its âcontrolâ. A long issue has been a disproportionate allocation goes to one francophone university in Montreal due to âpoliticsâ.
This latest tuition increase for out-of-province really affects students in Canada wanting to come to McGill. Even with the rate of increase, it is still cheaper for foreign students, including US, compared to similar US based options.
It is all politically motivated. The reality is for years McGill and Concordia have and should have increased tuition for "in provinceâ students. The government is terrified to do so. That shortfall has to be funded somewhere. If you live in Montreal, a year at McGill will cost you $6-7K canadian, at most.