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

[disastrid]

The French education in Canada is embarrassing. I started at age 9 and spent years learning things like the vocabulary for outer space, like "la planète" and "le spaceship". So if aliens ever invade, and they speak French, a whole bunch of Canadian kids who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s will be there to save the day.

Also I don't know if it's a case of anyone not being able to understand different types of French, it's just that dialects can take some time getting used to; it's like saying someone from Texas and someone from, say, Glasgow or Northern Ireland won't understand one another - the accent, idioms and language use take some getting used to and at first seem unintelligible, but come on. It's not like one party is speaking Chinese. Every language contains multitudes of interpretations and uses (Germany was particularly notable for this, and holy shit the UK is ridiculous) so the best possible strategy is probably to learn the most widely-recognised version and adjust the way you speak it. Of course this gives rise to a very pertinent debate around hegemony of language - which version is the "purest", who decides that, and what does that mean about people who speak something different - but there has to be a starting point somewhere. In Spain Catalan is spoken by a huge number of people in the richest part of the country, but it's still seen as "fringe", so I'm not sure these lines are always socioeconomic.

In Germany the accent from Saxony sounds like everyone is talking with their mouths full of mashed potato and is considered really farmery and podunk, and I noticed that when an American show was dubbed into German the character who was supposed to be kind of an idiot was dubbed in a Sachsisch accent. Oh what a tangled web of signifiers we weave.

[the_siobhan]

I agree with everything you say except the bit about Glasgow. That really is a different language.

Axel found something a few years ago that said that the accent that is currently thought of as "Southern" in the USA is the closest thing we have to what the English colonists sounded like when they were first arriving in North America. I find that shit fascinating.

BC showed me an episode of Outlander a couple of weeks ago and for some reason that's the thing that my brain locked onto as unrealistic. Not the time travel. The fact everybody identifies her as English because of the way she spoke and I kept saying "that wouldn't have happened, English accents didn't sound like that back then."

[kest]

Well...I imagine there's not anything else she *does* sound like, though?

[the_axel]

Most likely they'd identify here as a foreigner who learned English but has a crazy, weird accent.