MONTREAL – Quebec says it will hike tuition by 30 per cent for out-of-province Canadian students, to $12,000 a year, and wants most of them to speak French at an intermediate level by the time t...
They “can” but it’s rather useful as all hell to know English while living in Quebec. It’s a struggle to find anyone born in the province who is not bilingual for this reason.
How many different languages are spoken within a 1000 km of the UK? How large are those communities? How many of the people from other communities also speak English? Ask the same questions for Canada and the answers are 3 with any significant population, less than 10% for one and is spread across two countries while being the official language of the third country for the other, and the vast majority of them for two of the three countries.
The North American anglophone attitude is very pragmatic, as is the British anglophone’s. The same applies for the North American francophone attitude, although they like to complain like they aren’t a minority, both nationally and across the continent. And if a company from Quebec wants to expand outside the province’s borders, requiring their employees to speak French is going to reduce their candidate pool and hence increase their payroll costs, or their leaders are going to have to learn English which, as we’ve already discussed, they already mostly do.
You and I can talk about what we’d like to see, or how things should be, and we might even agree about it. But this is how things are.
Except at 49 years old, I’ve never encountered a moment I needed french. The same can’t be said going the other way.
Perfectly feasible to live in Quebec without ever needing English, we still learn it and bilingualism is much higher than in other provinces.
It’s just the Anglo North American attitude, even the British are more bilingual than Anglo Canadians and Americans.
They “can” but it’s rather useful as all hell to know English while living in Quebec. It’s a struggle to find anyone born in the province who is not bilingual for this reason.
It is very one sided overall.
Get out of major city centers and English is pretty much useless in Quebec but people will still know enough to get by.
How many different languages are spoken within a 1000 km of the UK? How large are those communities? How many of the people from other communities also speak English? Ask the same questions for Canada and the answers are 3 with any significant population, less than 10% for one and is spread across two countries while being the official language of the third country for the other, and the vast majority of them for two of the three countries.
The North American anglophone attitude is very pragmatic, as is the British anglophone’s. The same applies for the North American francophone attitude, although they like to complain like they aren’t a minority, both nationally and across the continent. And if a company from Quebec wants to expand outside the province’s borders, requiring their employees to speak French is going to reduce their candidate pool and hence increase their payroll costs, or their leaders are going to have to learn English which, as we’ve already discussed, they already mostly do.
You and I can talk about what we’d like to see, or how things should be, and we might even agree about it. But this is how things are.