Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
Also, many Swiss now just resort to speaking English with one another when they cross the country. Canton Zurich (German-speaking) recently decided to make English the first foreign language kids are exposed to in school, rather than French. The power of the English language hegemony is strong. If German speakers in Zurich can’t be bothered to learn French, even if they’re a 2 hour train ride away from their French-speaking counterparts (not to mention 60 million French speakers in nearby France), what hope is there to expect kids in Nanaimo to be fluent in French?
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The situation in Canada is also compounded by the fact that while English is for all intents and purposes an untouchable powerhouse language, French is still powerful enough both regionally in Canada and also globally, to give it a bit of a run for its money.
Most other languages within the context of Canada would have become moribund and bowed out to English way more than French has.
So if you look at most multilingual countries they are either more equal in relative power (Switzerland) and there is more of an equilibrium, or there is an imbalance (Spain) and as a result the minority languages have been eroded quite a bit and the degree of bitterness is quite high.
Canada lies somewhere in the middle.
Just as an example yesterday I was listening to a report on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and pretty much every German person commenting on the events (all of them Germans) was interviewed in French. I don't think you could pull that off in Catalan, or even in Swedish which unlike Quebec is an independent nation-state with its own language as the sole official language.
Many thousands of newcomers arrive in Quebec every year with knowledge of French (and not all of them from France) without us having to lift a finger to teach it to them. That's almost never the case in Barcelona or even Stockholm.