On another thread I mentioned the FreeCreditReport.Com guy (Eric Viollete) and he’s from Quebec and he doesn’t speak English well so they use another person to sing for him and he’s mouthing the words.
It’s also my understand (correct me if I’m wrong) Celine Dion also didn’t speak English till well after she was an established French speaking recording artist.
So for SD’ers that live there or have lived in Quebec, how French is it really? I mean are kids discouraged from learning English? I knew a man from New Brunswick and he spoke English and his parents put him in a total French immersion school starting at high school. So he’s fully bi-linguel now. (He was happy his folks did that, he said, otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered to learn it)
I’ve read things online, but they seem to be more patriotic than realistic, I was wondering if anyone had some first hand experience.
Obviously the government of Quebec wants to maintain French, but what’s the attitude of learning English in the province?
For instance, I’ve never been to Montreal but I’m assuming that I’d have no trouble getting around at all, even though I don’t speak French. Would this be so?
Like I’ve been to Tijuana and got around just fine. Sure it would’ve been nicer if I knew Spanish but it didn’t seem to hamper me much.
It varies. Everyone I know who lives in Quebec can speak English, but those I know who live outside of Montreal never actually need to know English in their daily lives and very rarely have the occasion to converse in it. So once in awhile when I visit they have trouble thinking up a word in English. They took English in school, but never needed to actually use it in day-to-day living, so they are functionally uni-lingual. They were never discouraged from learning English, but never had any occasion to practice.
In have had some pissy francophone cabbies demand that we speak French and when my friend could not (he was visiting from the U.S. and doesn’t speak a word of French), we got kicked out of the asshole’s cab. Thankfully, you don’t normally get that kind of assholishness.
No idea from a schooling perspective. When we first moved here (my mom is French Canadian) we went to a francophone school. All subjects were taught in French except for English as a second language (which it turns out, was exactly the same course material as the kids in English schools, so our English class was actually being taught to us at the “first-language” level). But we were living in Ontario.
IME, our francophone school was just like the anglophone schools only in reverse. We were taught math, science, geography etc. in French, then had our French reading/writing/grammar stuff, and a English class. My friends in anglophone schools were taught math, science, geography etc. in English, then had their English reading/wriing/grammar stuff, and a French class.
But again, that was francophone schooling in Ontario. Quebec had a different political climate at that time.
I live just over the river from Quebec. Everyone I know who lives in Quebec speaks French as well as English, but usually one language is better than the other. All the folks I’ve known who’ve grown up in this area have grown up speaking/using English regularly–around here it’s very easy to use both or only one exclusively. The further you go into the province and the further you are away from big cities, the worse the English gets. In many places, students learn English in school, but then don’t use it afterwards and it atrophies–how many people do you know who studied Spanish or German in high school and did well at it, but five or ten years later they only remembered a little?
I’m a French Canadian from eastern Ontario (Ottawa), I find that the furthest you go into Quebec from the Ontario border, the less fluently bilingual people you encounter, but mostly, Quebecers do speak some English.
Montreal is in a unique situation, with all the businesses established there, English is very prominent, to the point that I find that unless you address yourself in French first, most stores or restaurant staffs are likely to address you in English
Sorry if this is TLDR, but there’s a lot to address here!
There is no straightforward answer to this, but I would actually say that other than in areas around Gatineau/Hull, Montreal and Sherbrooke, most Quebecers actually don’t speak enough English to do more than maybe order a pizza or book a hotel room. They were taught some English in school, but never once needed to actually use it, and so it’s pretty much completely forgotten.
I’ve singled out those three areas because those are the largest pockets of Anglophones and Allophones in the province, AFAIK. Gatineau/Hull is across the river from Ottawa, which is very much bilingual due to the Federal Government being located there. Sherbrooke, or more specifically the smaller towns around Sherbrooke, is in the Eastern Townships, an area settled by Loyalists and English-speaking farmers in the years after the American Revolution. Today, the area is more French than English, but there’s still a very significant Anglophone population and history there.
And Montreal is Montreal… IIRC, more than half the population on the Island don’t speak French as their first language, but I don’t know how many of those are native English speakers, and how much bilingualism with French there is. On average, tourists who don’t speak French will encounter no trouble at all in Montreal. I wouldn’t say that that is the case off the Island, though as much as people like to tell stories about rude Quebecers, I really believe that most people will make an effort to be helpful and friendly even if they don’t speak English.
Schooling:
Bill 101 is a provincial law which regulates who has access to education in which language in Quebec. In essence, everyone is required to attend a French-language school from grade 1 to 11 (the end of high school here) unless they are exempted under rather specific rules, quoted from the wiki here:
I received my education in English, because my father is an Anglophone Quebecer, and my mom taught French in the English school board and wanted us to have the same holiday schedules! Seriously, had she been hired by the French school board, I would have gone to school in French.
Anyways, my husband is "pure-laine’ Quebecois, with French ancestry going back to forever, and as such could not legally have attended public school in English. I have no idea how private schools are regulated, but my understanding is that they are a bit of a legal loophole around the law, but that doesn’t apply to most people, since most families can’t afford or don’t want to afford private schooling anyways.
So a very, very large majority of people in Quebec go to French language schools. Up until recently, English classes only began in Grade 4, through to the end of high school (an hour a day), but now the classes start in Grade 1. From what I’ve seen of my cousins-in-law, who range between grades 3-8 at the moment, they are far from fluent in English.
Quebecers can do their Cegep and University studies in either language - Cegep requires 2 classes in the other language (so 2 French classes at English colleges, and 2 English classes at French colleges) in order to graduate. There are no language requirements for University education other than being able to pass fluency tests to show that you will be able to keep up in your classes (the TOEFL, or the French equivalent whose name I forget).
I don’t think anyone discourages their children from learning English, but I do know a lot of people (note that I have no idea how widespread this is) who feel that they and their children shouldn’t need to learn English, because “this is a French province”. I happen to think that that is a rather stupid and ignorant position to take, because as much as I encourage this province to be French, you can’t really deny that everyone around us happens to be English, and sooner or later you might have to ask one of them for directions or a job or something! That said, even the people who have expressed that attitude to me have either sent their kids to English summer camps, or encouraged the kids to speak in English with me, or whatever, so the kids are learning it anyways. TV, the Internet, music and movies are probably contributing to a lot of children being able to understand a fair amount of English without being comfortable or able to actually speak it themselves.
Born and raised in the Montreal suburbs. I was raised speaking both English and French at home - my dad’s family was more Anglophone, with his mom being from the UK (came over when she was 5 or so), and my mom’s family was straight-up French-Canadian. Both parents worked in primarily English-speaking jobs and I guess we were mostly English-speaking at home but with Grandmaman and the rest of Mom’s family, it was all French.
Elementary school, for as far back as I can remember, was both English and French. We had English and French class, but our other subjects were sometimes French, sometimes English. One year, science would be in English, the next year it’d be in French. Same with history and math and such. I seem to recall that half the day was taught by a French-speaking teacher, and the other half was the English-speaking teacher. Once I was in high school, it was all English, since my family (and I) elected to place me in an English school. But we still had French class.
Kids aren’t discouraged from learning English. It’s an important language, it’s used a lot in the workplace, and it’s seen as pretty necessary to learn at least enough to get by. Whether it’s done as a “second-language” thing or a more intense immersion program depends on the individual schools and families, I think.
Yes, as far as I know (not having really followed her career) she took a year-long break from recording and touring sometime around 1989 to take English classes.
Quebec is mostly French-speaking. If I remember right, French is the native language of around 80% of the population, English of 7-8%, with the rest of the population speaking some other native tongue. This said, francophone Quebecers must take a ESL class starting in 1st grade until the end of high school. Cégeps (pre-university or technical programs) also require two English classes for graduation, and universities can decide their curricula and presumably require French or English classes. I assume the same is true (in reverse) for the anglophone school system.
Despite this, many Quebecers have a best a basic knowledge of English. This is because second-language classes aren’t the best way to learn a language – English immersion programs aren’t offered in Quebec – and most Quebecers do not use any English in their day-to-day life. Many English-speaking Canadians will tell you that despite learning French in school, now their only use for it is reading food labels. It’s basically the same thing here. Still, English is more prevalent than French Canada-wide or North America-wide, so something like 40% of francophone Quebecers consider themselves fluent in English. This is much higher than the proportion of anglophone Canadians fluent in French. As for anglophone Quebecers, 70% or so of them are fluent in French, a consequence of living in a mainly French-speaking society.
Most anglophones in Quebec are found in the greater Montreal area, especially in the western part of Montreal Island. At some point they were present in many more areas (the Eastern Townships and the Outaouais region were for example largely founded by English-speakers, including former American Tories) but most of them have migrated to the Montreal area. This is also where most “allophones” (native speakers of neither French nor English) and immigrants are found. As mnemosyne notes, there is also a certain amount of anglophones and allophones in Gatineau, many of them attracted to the lower housing prices compared to Ottawa on the other side of the Ottawa River, and some long-established English-speaking pockets in the Eastern Townships, Gaspésie and North Coast.
Language also has a political dimension in Quebec. This is due to the fact that before 1970 or so, francophones in Quebec were economically inferior to anglophones and often couldn’t work in French, or wouldn’t be served in French by businesses. Most immigrants also didn’t consider it necessary to learn French when moving to Quebec since English was the prestige language, and also since Canada at the time favoured immigration from English-speaking or Germanic countries. This was seen as abnormal, since, and I will emphasize this, ever since the 1960s when there was a break among “French-Canadians” between Quebec and the rest of Canada, most francophone Quebecers have considered themselves as a majority group centered in Quebec, not a minority in Canada. So starting around 1970 there was a movement by francophones to “reclaim” their province. Laws were passed to make French the language of business and education in Quebec. Some of them met with disapproval from anglophones and the federal government, for example the so-called “language laws” that require commercial signage to be predominantly in French and the school laws that restrict English public school to actual Canadian anglophones, sending francophones and allophones (and anglophones from other countries) in the French sector unless parents make use of the private sector. Quebec also adopted its own immigration policy, favouring immigrants from French-speaking countries such as Haiti, North Africa and the former French colonies of sub-Saharan Africa. All this has caused changes to the demographic makeup of Quebec in favour of French. Many anglophones, not wanting to become a linguistic minority, left Quebec; those who are still here now mainly speak French and accept their status as a minority. And a greater number of immigrants know the language of the majority. Still, linguistic peace hasn’t been entirely achieved.
Now to your questions. If you go to Montreal, chances are that most people you’ll find will speak English. And they probably won’t mind speaking it with you. Since you’re an American, nobody really expects you to know French. Now if you were a Canadian, or a Quebecer, this could be different. Take me for example: I don’t expect Canadians from the other provinces to know French. If they come here, I’ll speak English with them without any trouble. But for people who actually live in Quebec, I expect them to pretty soon set themselves the goal of learning French. This causes some friction, because Quebec is part of Canada and Canada is a “bilingual” country, so some people expect that they should be able to choose French or English wherever they are in the country. (Or they haven’t integrated the sentence I emphasized earlier, and see “French-Canadians” as a minority group in Canada, just like Chinese-Canadians or Ukrainian-Canadians, and don’t see why they should learn one of these minority languages.) And indeed, in some parts of Quebec, notably in Montreal, you can live for years without ever learning a word of French. But I guarantee you that if you try to do this you will run into some hostility. Whether it’s warranted, I see someone who lives in Quebec but never bothers to at least be functionally fluent in French as snubbing the vast majority of the population and its culture. Whereas the US is a more individualistic culture, Quebec has a more communautarian culture, and it’s implied that you have some sort of implied social contract with the rest of the community. This is the key to understanding much of Quebec’s mentality and politics. But if you’re only here as a visitor, you probably won’t have the time to see much of it. I don’t think it’s possible to really understand Quebec and its culture unless you speak decent French and live in the cultural bath in which francophone Quebecers live.
I should point out that Quebecers, for the most part, are not hypocrites about this social contract. We expect people who come to live among us to be able to communicate with us in our language and to learn something about our values and what makes us tick. But we’ll do the same if we go live among other peoples. I’m reminded of Doper jovan who’s a former Quebecer, now Japanese, and who according to his own account is now quite integrated into Japanese society. I believe that his zeal to integrate himself into his new society instead of remaining among expats was at least partly a function of his sensibilities as a former member of the Quebec society. I can’t say how the native Japanese view him.
As said, ESL classes are compulsory starting in 1st grade; when I was in school it started in 4th grade but they’re now doing it earlier to improve our English proficiency. In any case, most people who become fluent in English do so not because of the classes they took in school but because they’ve had to use it elsewhere. There are no English immersion (public) programs available to students, and it might not be politically feasible to introduce them. Why? To add to mnemosyne’s post and answer it at the same time, many people, while recognizing the importance of English as an international language and a North American language, and recognizing that Quebecers should know it to be competitive on the global stage, fear that opening English public schools to francophones would send the message that knowing English and only English and spending all one’s life in English is acceptable in Quebec, thereby reducing French to a minority language status again. English immersion is not the same thing as English-language schools, but it could cause some confusion. As mnemosyne reported, some (including me) think that this is a French-speaking province, so people should know French and use it as their common language of communication, but also know English as a Canadian and international language. This may seem complicated to an American, but it makes sense. This said, there have been political proposals to start teaching some subjects in both languages in Quebec schools. Ideally we’d have a single school system, with something like 70% of school time in French and 30% in English, but that would be against Canada’s constitution.
If the OP has other questions, I’d be happy to answer them.
Anglo Canadian who’s lived in Quebec. Attitudes to anglophones vary considerably depending on where you are, in my experience.
In Montreal, if I began to speak in French to francophones, they would normally smile and switch to English, to save time.
In Québec City, if I began to speak French to francophones, they would normally smile and continue the conversation in French, to encourage me in my efforts to use French.
My wife is Québecoise, and I was woefully unprepared to spend time in Québec City.
I would have preferred to have some minimal French, but I’m a terrible procrastinator. (Hey, I’m procrastinating right now!)
Anyway, I had been given to expect to piss people off with my lack of French, not least of which by what my wife had told me about what to expect. My experience was pretty far from that, though.
Her friends and family were all very patient with me, but I suppose that’s to be expected, socially. In public, the declaration “Je suis désolé, ma tête est très carré” may have gone some ways to break the ice. Beyond that, I’d be lucky to manage a short, idiot construction. People would helpfully correct my grammar and carry on. “Avez-vous un sac plastique?” “Un sac de plastique? Oui.”
I was generally pretty embarrassed about my inability, but the attitude was generally, “You spent your entire life on the West Coast - why would you speak French?”
I did have the impression that people were pleased if I attempted some French, no matter how hurtful it must have been to their ears. Also, I think people tend to be more forgiving when you’re basically a tourist.
On the other hand, I did hear some disparaging remarks made about some neighbours who had lived in Québec City for decades without picking up any French. This makes sense to me; I can’t really imagine why anyone would do that.
One thing that I noticed - some friends had a child in English immersion, and there is a requirement for at least one parent to be an anglophone to qualify for this, as a protective measure.
Also, French wasn’t as universal as I had expected. The “Language Police” got a lot of press in our national media for some time, particularly with regard to signage. This was portrayed as very strict, and oh-so-volatile. Turns out, not so much. Yes, a lot of stores have translated names, as expected. “Staples” is “Bureau en Gros,” which makes sense because the french word for “staple” doesn’t have the same double meaning. A popular convenience store (“Mac’s”) is branded as “Couche-Tard,” which works better, anyway. However, while there are plenty of examples of store names being “franco-fied,” like “McDonalds”, etc – there are just as many that just do business under their English name, and don’t seem to suffer any for it. I would think that “The Children’s Place” would be a little alienating instead of its french equivalent, but “The Children’s Place” is still “The Children’s Place” and nobody seems to care, so long as they have a good selection of cute clothes.
I was also surprised that all of the appliances I saw had only English on them. Not too difficult to suss out why, I guess - but still, that might annoy the hell out of me if I didn’t speak any English.
I’m just back from Montreal, and I was very surprised at how French it was. I had always assumed that people speak French in Quebec like the Scottish speak Gaelic: a few hardcore speakers keeping it alive in the hinterlands, but mostly everybody speaking English as a first language. Walking around Montreal, the majority of people were speaking to each other in French, and many shopkeepers also greeted you initially in French.
I was also told Quebec City is a lot more French than Montreal.
I wish I had found this! I got the same response in Quebec (I spent a summer there) as you did in Montreal. And I don’t think my French is that bad.
It varies a lot according to context, though. I assume that when I went into a store in Sainte-Foye, near the university, as a student there in the summer, they knew I was there to learn French and I recall they usually obliged. And when I went into a touristy store or restaurant downtown, they assumed I was a tourist and tried to speak English. But I remember having lots of conversations where I spoke French the entire time, and a Quebecois responded in English.
If, however, a salesperson compliments my French, they can be assured of a sale. I have a beautiful (rather expensive on my budget) scarf that I haven’t found an occasion to wear once. I bought it mainly because, when chatting with the salesman, he told me that I must live in Quebec now, because my French was too good for a Torontonian! Sales staff should take heed - switching to English when the customer tries with French is often not a good strategy.
ETA to Captain Ridley that yes, the province of Quebec really is French! The country is bilingual more along the lines of Switzerland than Scotland, or even Ireland (where the language is being somewhat forceably revived, I believe). The aboriginal languages, except for those spoken by the Inuit and people in the far north, are generally in terminal decline, however.
It may make sense, but the fact is for many people it is possible to live in Quebec for decades without ever learning more than a few words of French. Of course, it requires ignoring and isolating oneself from the vast majority of the population. I guess some people just aren’t in any way curious about the culture of the place where they live.
Of course, if you’re a tourist, while you speaking French is appreciated, it’s not necessary. As you’ve said, the attitude is, since you’re from Western Canada, why would you know it? But I understand why you’d it embarrassing; I felt the same way when I spent a week in Poland and two in Germany this summer. I’m also a procrastinator, and that’s why I’ve registered for an Italian language class this fall. It will force me to get some practice, and hopefully I’ll speak it decently when I go for a work term in Italy next winter.
It’s certainly possible for honest people to disagree about the signage laws, but the first thing to know is that there is no “language police”. The OQLF only investigates citizen complaints. The original idea was that the government should only intervene if a business’s lack of French service actually causes trouble to potential patrons. But some people have taken it on themselves to investigate businesses, some of which aren’t even near their home, and file complaints.
This comment made me check the history of Alimentation Couche-Tard, inc., which owns the Couche-Tard and Mac’s brands. I’m not certain, but it appears that Couche-Tard acquired the “winking owl” logo with its purchase of the Winks chain of convenience stores, and started branding Mac’s stores with it in 1999, when these stores were bought by Couche-Tard.
That’s true for the writing on the appliance itself, but I believe they’re legally supposed to offer a user’s manual in French. The quality of this is variable, but then again it’s also true of user’s manuals in English (see “Engrish”).
Not to get too political, but Switzerland seems to me to be an example that Canada should try to emulate.
Even then, I’ve heard that of all the public schools in Nunavut, none of them offers schooling in the Inuit’s first language. This seems to me to be at odds with the stated purpose of the existence of Nunavut.
Indeed, I have elderly relatives who have lived in Montreal for more than 50 years and don’t speak a single world of French. In their defense, they moved to the city from Europe in the 50s and it was hard enough for them to learn English – which they still speak with a strong accent.
I can easily imagine living in Montreal without feeling motivated to learn French.
Oh, I know - the quotes are supposed to be ironic.
That makes sense. If my memory is correct, back in the mid-seventies, Mac’s was “Mac’s Milk,” and their logo was a black cat. (with a bottle of milk, maybe?) googlesYes. Okay, he’s wearing Scottish kit to go with the name, and the “milk” bottle looks more like Scotch… but…
My wife is Quebecoise. She speaks English with no trace of an accent, but her schooling was conducted entirely in French and it was the primary language spoken in the house. Since a portion of her family lives in Ontario and speak very little French, she was exposed to English early and learned to speak it well.
As a kindness to me, when we’re visiting the family speaks mostly in English. My French has improved over the past three years we’ve been going up on visits, but I’m still nowhere near proficient.
One thing I’ve encountered in Montreal and Quebec City is an interesting double standard. If you’re Canadian and can’t speak French, you may well get a bit of attitude. If you’re American, you get a pass. Say, “Desole, je suis Americain. Je ne parle pas le Francais tres bien,” with a little bit of embarrassment in your tone and suddenly the French speaker’s English improves dramatically. I kind of appreciate that. Canada is supposed to be bilingual, and I can understand where they feel a little heat if their countrymen couldn’t be bothered to learn their language, since they, theoretically, had to learn English.
Another interesting thing about Quebec in general and Montreal in particular is the huge volume of mixing back and forth between the languages in the same conversation, even in the same sentence. It’s called Franglais, and it’s a huge help in terms of acclimating.
One last note, just as a fair warning, the accent difference between Quebec French and the Parisian French you will learn from language tapes or in a non-Canadian French class is pretty significant. Expect some strange looks until you pick up the differences. Unlike Parisians, Quebecois aren’t known for being snooty about it, though.
