Quote:
Originally Posted by New Brisavoine
That's where Québec is a bit schizophrenic. On the one hand they refuse to give English official status, they don't want to be a bilingual province like New Brunswick, they are officially unilingual French, but on the other hand it seems they are not entirely comfortable with it, perhaps feeling unconsciously guilty, I don't know, so they speak English to journalists, which contradicts their official language policy. The Catalans would never do that.
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All stateless minority peoples respond to their specific situations and challenges in their own ways, and some of those ways may seem bizarre or illogical to outsiders.
Québécois nationalists have always been vulnerable and sensitive to allegations of xenophobia and anglophobia - the latter being important because anglophones are our only neighbours all around us, whereas Catalans have neighbours who speak multiple languages. So perhaps they have less of a concern of being labelled "castellanophobes".
That said, Catalans have always controlled the economy of Catalonia (and were once some of the most powerful industralists and businesspeople in Spain), something which is very different from Quebec where anglophones controlled the economy until the 60s-70s.
It's interesting to me that in spite of the Catalan control the economy in Catalonia generally uses Spanish to function internally. (I understand they'd use Spanish to deal with the rest of Spain.)
In Quebec, francophones have taken control of much of the economy in the past couple of decades, and where Québécois francophones are in control, the internal operating language tends to be French or very predominantly French with English used only when necessary.
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