NaDruWriNi 2018 Chapter Four: A Country Divided

[the_siobhan]

Current alcohol count: I am never going to finish this fucking g&t, seriously he made it in a pint glass.

elusis brought up learning French in my languages post and reminded me of something that has pissed me off for decades.

In theory, Canada is a bilingual country. In reality, we have one bilingual province, (New Brunswick, population approximately 750K) and one bilingual city. (Montreal, population approximately 1.7 million) When I call them bilingual I mean that most of the population speaks both languages. The rest of the country speaks either English or French but not both.

Two of my co-workers speak to each other in Punjabi when they are trying to figure something out quickly and it's just the two of them because it's so much faster. This led to a conversation with one of them about how many languages he speaks. (Five) "But you speak French, don't you? I thought in Canada you all learn to speak French."

I don't know about the rest of the country, but let me tell you about French education in Toronto.

I started off in Scarborough, which is one of the suburbs of Toronto. There they started French classes in grade 6. (I would have been 12.) An hour long class, once a week.

Halfway through grade 6 I moved to Toronto proper, where they start French classes in Grade 4. Two hours a week now. Since I was obviously two years behind I had no idea what was going on and my teacher made it very clear she had no interest in catching me up. I literally did not learn a single word. I tried a couple of times in High School but... well as previously explained I don't have a language brain and it didn't really take.

The fucked up thing is that I have friends who did French immersion when they were growing up. (That's a school where every class is taught in French.) They are completely proficient in French - as long as they are speaking to somebody from France. Because apparently Quebecois French, the language spoken by the largest French-speaking population in Canada, is completely different than the French that is taught in our schools.

This blows my mind. That you can go to a French school in Canada and they will teach you French - but not the French that is actually spoken in your own country.

My sister actually went through something similar when she was living in Switzerland. She took German classes to try to become proficient enough to get a job while she was there, but the only language classes she could take were in High German. Not in the Swiss German that was actually spoken in Zurich where she lived. So even if she passed the course with flying colours she wouldn't be employable because she wouldn't be able to communicate with her co-workers who were all speaking Swiss German.

I don't get it.

You know what? Fuck both official languages. Rightfully we should all be learning Cree and Inuktitut anyway.

I wonder how hard they are to learn.

Comments

[elusis]

Thank goodness times have changed. My friends S & N are native English speaking white people, but they live in the Mission in SF. Both had some Spanish but upon deciding to have children, did some immersion classes to improve their skills, and thereupon deliberately *only spoke to their daughter in Spanish* for the first two years of her life. It helps that when they both went back to work, her daycare was with a Spanish speaking woman, but still - they were DISCIPLINED about this. I babysat for the sprog a few times and would be rushing around looking up nouns or using broken Spanglish while my English-only partner tried to keep up.

They assumed, and were 100% correct, that she would get plenty of English from her environment - even living in the Mission - to develop it as well. They sent her to a mixed English/Spanish pre-school, and lo and behold, she tested able to go to a Spanish-language kindergarten this year. Kid is growing up bilingual and it will serve her for the rest of her life - my few bilingual Spanish students can command a premium at the rare paying jobs around here while interns.

If I reproduced, I don't know that I'd be that disciplined. But I sure as hell see the value. (FFS, it made their choices of caregivers so much broader that she and they speak Spanish).

[elusis]

Also, Duolingo does not teach Quebecois French and I've no idea what would make it unintelligible to contenental French speakers, but that's terrifying. No wonder they want to secede.

[the_siobhan]

From what I understand they speak the working-class version of the language that was current in the 16th & 17th century. Plus some added slang, colloquialisms, and pronunciations that were borrowed from working class English, local indigenous languages and some additional random stuff that developed independently. Quebecois speakers can usually understand Parisian speakers but not so much the other way around.

(True story, I have a Scottish friend who learned French while living in Paris and who is now living in Montreal. So he speaks Parisian French with a thick Scottish accent. Seeing the expressions on the faces of the Quebecois who hear him for the first time is a truly glorious thing.)

I had a conversation with a taxi driver who was from Algiers who was able to immigrate to Canada on strength of being a French speaker. (You get a lot of points for speaking one of the official languages.) But when he arrived in Montreal he couldn't understand the locals. He said he decided if he was going to have to learn another language he wanted it to be English so he moved to Toronto.