City of Montreal’s French action plan

The city is promising a plan that will ensure the role and exemplary nature of the French language for the city. This puzzles me, because the city does everything in French already, so what else can they do?

Reduce their use of English, I suppose, because then it will look like they’re more determined about it.

I saw that story on my ipad this morning and went to find it to post, and when you look up the words “Montreal français” here are the headlines:

Joly et le français: on nous raconte des histoires (Mathieu Bock-Côté. The stories are not good.)

«Le français dégringole à une vitesse jamais vue»

Protection du français: est-il trop tard?

Le français au Québec: une langue sans pays – Denise Bombardier

And now, from Radio-Canada, Défense de la langue française : qu’en pensent les trentenaires? Here’s a cite: “Sentent-ils que la langue française est menacée? « Non! Je n’ai pas l’impression que ça va mal pour la langue. On a aussi une vision vraiment montréalocentriste, parce qu’on vit à Montréal, mais si on regarde à la grandeur du Québec, non! »

I was struck recently by this letter to the editor in Le Devoir, where the writer speaks about le virus linguistique anglophone, an evil to be stamped out for sure. (It’s delightful to feel that your language, the language you speak and in which your life is expressed, is seen as a disease. An unearned thrill of wickedness!) Pierre Lincourt writes angrily from Chicoutimi – where I’m guessing he never hears a word of the langue de Shakespeare spoken from one year’s end to the next – of terms he hears on the media and presumably reads on the internet.

These usages have nothing to do with local anglos and how we live our lives, but we’re the ones who have to do penance for the virus we carry. Has anyone got a face mask that will stop English words from getting through?