Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Not sure this necessarily helps the cause of Canadian federalism in the long run. American corporations don't have a problem adapting to the local language in societies far smaller than Quebec and with languages way more obscure than French. So at least part of this reticence is attributable to the "they're in Canada, why don't they just speak English?" mindset.
You couldn't make that case against French in Quebec if...
(Notable that the Americans have stayed out of the Quebec language debate in the 50+ years that it's raged on. In spite of the best efforts of Anglo-Quebecers to get them involved. They've never bitten. Until now.)
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I think it's two things. One, as you say, is the fact that Québec is not independent and so is assumed to be Anglophone since it's the province of an Anglophone country. But the second is the fact this is French, and I think the Americans have always had something against the French language in North America, going back to the 17th century. And even if today's Americans don't spend their time reading history books and have only a faint notion of that history, there's of course this cultural background that lingers on. If Québec was Spanish-speaking, I have a feeling there'd be less hostility. French has always been seen as snobbish, elitist, and detestable by the Anglo-Saxons (except for the tiny minority of Francophiles, which has also always existed).
In fact this hostility goes way more back than the 17th century, but all the way back to the Middle Ages and the Franco-Norman conquest of England. Let's not forget that it is the English who founded the US. Language also seems to be an obsession for the Anglo-Saxons more generally (you can see it in the way the Americans, whenever they are angry at France, always, always come back to "if it hadn't be for us you'd be
speaking German now", as JD Vance said again recently... it's a typical US obsession, whereas when the French think of German invasions and occupation the issue of language is never one that matters much to us). Recently I've been reading Jonathan Sumption's extraordinary 5-volume history of the Hundred Years' War, and what struck was how the English back in the 14th century were already totally obsessed with this idea that if they didn't spend tax money to wage war on France, France would invade them and
force them to speak French. The issue of language seemed very, very important to them, some language nationalists of sort, a bit like the Québécois today ironically, whereas the French (who spoke many different languages back then anyway) didn't have that obsession with language.
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