In my Catholic school board, French kids didn’t go through the French immersion stream. They went to French-language schools. French immersion is a different concept; it’s not just dumping kids into a regular Francophone school.
But even then there just weren’t a whole huge number of French kids. There were enough to put together a small school; they were outnumbered by English kids in immersion.
Muffin, no can do. I didn’t grow up in Halton.
I grew up in Alberta and went to French immersion school from kindergarten to the 12th grade. There were over 60 kids in two classes in the first grade but only ~10 of us stuck through to the 12th. Also, not many of the kids in the class had any sort of French ancestry, I was one of the few. Although, because there were no actual French language schools in Alberta, we did pick up a couple of native French speakers in the class when their parents moved west for whatever reason. We even picked up a Parisienne whose family moved to Alberta to be closer to the mormon temple!
the “linguistic bigots” are chafing over the politics of distribution of goodies from the Big Government, in this case in the form of cushy government jobs that, according to their claims, seem to go to one group of people in preference over some other group of people that they lobby for. If any of them is in fact trying to “take away” “language and associated culture” from anybody, it’s not apparent from the OP article.
I was, and I worked with a woman who taught in the Waterloo program that you described.
Yup, I went back to the VDARE cesspit to find what Their Leader thinks. Indeed, the Hellhole that is Canada should make all WASP’s shake in fear! (Well, I’m White. But my people used a rude word based on “Saxon.” Between religions for many years, I never was a Protestant.)
Unclear. (Is the OP’s first language English? No great communicator he.) Hey, OP: What do you think of the main reason for the smelly treasure you dug up? That is, are you fearful of The Brown Threat here in the USA?
From The Southern Poverty Law Center:
Sidenote: most of the people of New France were speaking French before most of the people of France.
Then they are ignorant of the Act of Union and how the second Baldwin-Lafontaine government had to deal with it. Quite simply, if you take away a person’s ability to communicate with his or her own government, you are forcing assimilation on that person, which eventually takes away that person’s language and associated culture. That wasn’t part of the deal, so any newcomers had better recognize it.
I feel that way about the Battle of the Spurs, but it looks like history went on without me.
Ok. 
But that wasn’t a very uncommon attitude until recently. Until the 1960s, the common attitude of English Canadians was that Canada was an English speaking country with a French speaking minority. What was stressed was, “We’re a British Dominion, we’re part of the Commonweath, etc”
I’m looking here at a 1914 High School Canadian History textbook from Ontario, and it does talk about the French settlement of Canada and goes into detail about how the settlers of New France lived, but then there’s the chapter on the Seven Years War, and then the French in Canada are pretty much an afterthought. There’s a little bit about the Red River Rebellion and North-West Rebellion, and a chapter, or part of a chapter, on “Quebec 1864-1914”, which includes the great paragraph (bolding mine):
The bolded part wouldn’t be out of place in some editorials nowadays. Oh, there’s also a section on Quebec poets. But that’s pretty much it. (The book also has the great line “Manitoba was long the stormy petrel of Dominion politics.” I need to find a way to use that.)
If it helps, the treatment of the First Nations is even worse. We find out that they were warlike, that the Huron-Iroquois were more interesting than the Algonquin, that they were naturally fickle, that they loved freedom, that the Iroquois had a form of democracy, that they were sexist, that they were haughty and dignified with a strict code of manners, that they were by nature “nervous and hysterical”, that they might have worshiped a Great Spirit, and that the Hudson Bay Company treated them really badly.
But anyway, this was the common attitude in most of Canada until pretty recently.. . .that the French had a role in settling the place in the first place, and that was all very good and nice, but that Quebec should really get with the program and get over the whole French thing. You shouldn’t be surprised that that attitude still sort of exists.
Add to that a lot of sentiments in the West, a lot of Westerners not having any use for Quebec or Ontario anyway, and they see it as just another case of Quebec, who they figure gets all the money…all their money… in transfer payments anyway, whining and demanding special treatment.
How is this sentence supposed to make any sense?
When New France was first being settled, there were many different languages spoken in France. The one that ended up becoming what we now know as French (French out of Paris) took quite some time to be adopted by pretty much everyone in France. It happens that the people in New France ended up all speaking French before all of France ended up speaking French.
Oh, you mean Quebec achieved language unification before France. Your bizarrely convoluted sentence made it sound as if, somehow, modern French had been invented in Quebec.
It’s a pity that transfer payments, such as equalization, have been confused with linguistic rights. I think Pearson made a mistake when he tried to cover both at the same conference.
The first big push for transfer payments was made toward the end of the great depression, due to the problems suffered in the prairies. WWII put the development of a transfer program on hold, and it was eventually revisited by Pearson. Manning strongly rejected the idea, for he correctly perceived it to be a centralization of power by the federal government, which intended to look after health and welfare (Manning was also very strongly opposed to socialized health care). Eventually we ended up with transfer payment programs, which have been reviewed on an ongoing basis, and which will continue to be reviewed.
Note that although Quebec, being a populous province, has been a signifiant player in the transfer payment debate and development, it was not the driving force behind it. Transfer payments have nothing to do with Quebec being a distinctly different culture with its own language. Indeed, transfer payments are certainly neither unique to Canada nor uncommon ( Equalization payments - Wikipedia ).
It’s a pity that some people equate transfer payments with bilinqual employees of the federal government.
Bizarrely convoluted? Nah. Just read the links next time if you are having difficulty with context.
Very good post, and you say nothing here with which I disagree.
However, I did want to make the point from my own family history that doing something about it is not always so easy. We were living in Montreal in the 70s when the first strict language laws were enacted.
I was only a teenager so I was only mildly annoyed, but my father saw the writing on the wall. French was the fourth language he had learned since birth, and he wasn’t very good at it. Since he was in his mid-40s it was hard for him to learn new languages and he was tired of having to learn them at all. As I said, he already had to learn second languages twice in his life when he moved from one country to another – first German right after college, and then English in his late 20s.
He struggled with French for a while after we moved to Montreal, but at least in the early years: 1972-75, it wasn’t really necessary. After that it became clearer that he would need to know French to have any kind of substantial career there, and it would be impossible for him. So in 1977 we moved to Los Angeles.
My family bailed out of Montreal in the early 60s, along with a great many of their friends and co-workers. The writing was on the wall for Anglos, so over the next couple of decades, the economic centre of Canada completed its move from Montreal to Toronto.
Yes, it is kind of funny that American right-wing nativists are using Canada as the horror story about bilingualism, even though there is no way to validly compare the two countries, in terms of history and of both languages’ current status. I’d say it’s indicative of their shallow thought process.
I think the comparison’s even been encouraged from time to time by Canadian anti-bilingualism activists who thought being supported by a relatively powerful subgroup of American right-wingers would help their cause.
Yes, this seems to be how it works where there are French-language schools available. I don’t know where LC Strawhouse is, but it’s possible that there just aren’t any French-language schools over there, so for French-language parents the best available option is French immersion. I know Canadian provinces have an obligation to offer public schooling to the minority official language group, but I’m not sure what this obligation actually entails, e.g. if it’s common for minority language public schools to be far and difficult to access, in places where the minority language group is small.
Do you agree with the claims of the “linguistic bigots”? Do you understand what we’ve explained here?
If there’s one thing that discussing this country with anglophone Canadians, here and elsewhere, has taught me, is that no matter how much one can claim to look at the issues completely dispassionately and considering all the facts, we’re always referring back to our preconceptions, to what we learned, to how our formative experiences shaped us. If I and an anglophone both look at Canada, we just don’t see the same thing. The things I can see, they’ll consider irrelevant or overblown, or they just won’t believe them, while they’ll see things that to me are the epitome of unimportance. I never knew how major an issue Tim Horton’s apostrophe was to anglophones before I started posting here, for example. (There’s a recent thread where someone asked if McDonald’s has a different name in Canada, or something. If anybody’s wondering, here’s McDonald’s of Canada’s French-language website.)
So because of this, it’s no wonder that what English Canadian editorialists today write is a function of what they learned and of the view of Canada they developed. School can definitely influence this.
I understood Muffin’s post correctly, but for the record, when was modern French invented? What’s the cutoff date?
I’m not going to cry about that suranyi. Anyway, it looks like your family did all right in Los Angeles. But they decided that they had no intention of learning the language of the country where they were living, and that for this reason they should move elsewhere, in a place where they already spoke the national language. It’s a valid decision.
Your father could have improved his French and made a career in Montreal. He simply saw no use for that. I won’t criticize that choice; in fact I think it’s great that he decided to go elsewhere instead of staying there, hoping for everyone to accommodate him.
Well, as you say Toronto was already moving past Montreal as the economic centre of Canada back in the 60s, so it’s not like anything that happened after that could have reversed that movement. And now Canada’s economic centre has moved westward again, towards Alberta.
I’m not suranyi’s father, but I’d imagine the answer he’d give you to that is that he already did speak the language of the country he was living in, and all of a sudden, the province that he lived in decided that he wasn’t going to be allowed to use that language anymore.
Which has essentially happened to most of the groups within the British Empire at one time or another, starting with the British themselves (back when “British” meant “Welsh or Cornish, but not English”). And of course today the English [del]whine[/del] complain about the bilingual policy in Wales, too. My family is Anglo-Canadian all the way back*, and most of them are pretty unenlightened about language policy. From a social science perspective, you either prop up the minority languages or you hasten their extinction. There isn’t really a neutral policy available for government to follow, since the social and economic pressure exerted by the prestige language of the majority is enormous. Not to mention the pressure from the USA.
*I guess technically some of them would have been Gaelic speakers in the 1700s, but as far back as our collective memory goes.
I don’t know. I expect during the 19th century, with some geezers holding out into the 20th century.
Here is a list of languages native to Metropolitan France that are still spoken today :
The following is illustrative :
(My potted translation is bracketed passim.)
Also illustrative is :
Now I can’t say which figure is correct, but it certainly looks like a great many people in France didn’t speak French until at least the 19th century.
Meanwhile, in New France :