Dumont on English in Montreal
Mario Dumont writes about the persistence of English in Montreal and what must be done to stamp it out. “La CAQ va imposer le français en s’appuyant sur la volonté du reste du Québec” – yes, let’s let the little old man in Joliette have his way with the province’s economic turbine, as we cope with a pandemic.
Uatu 12:59 on 2020-08-22 Permalink
Yeah sure Mario. Hey let’s limit access to English post secondary education like the caq talks about. Good thing you already got your degree from Concordia, right?
Also no one should take that Netflix show seriously as a travelogue. It’s more a self indulgent foodie stuffing his face and who cares about being accurate about the location as long as there’s eating to be done
david39 13:12 on 2020-08-22 Permalink
At the risk of further virtue signalling, which Kate hates, Montreal has long had a “barely Quebecois” feeling about it among people in the provinces, and I personally think that this timeless push-and-pull about the prominence of English in Montreal is a legitimate topic of public debate.
There’s a giant number of foreign students funneling into Montreal most of whom are both studying and interacting in totally in English. My niece just graduated from McGill (her French is utterly mediocre of course) and during her time there she ran in a majorly mixed group, none of whom spoke any French (other than the Quebecois and French), because they weren’t from here and didn’t need or care to learn it. Montreal is very easy to navigate with zero French.
If you’re some Quebec type, this has strike you as a failure, in some sense, of the whole project. So it’s only natural to think about ways to correct this.
jeather 14:08 on 2020-08-22 Permalink
If you (general you), a francophone from outside Montreal, want to fix Montreal by making it Frencher, you need to (a) move to Montreal and speak French and (b) improve English language teaching in high school so kids won’t be desperate to go to English post-secondary to finally learn the language.
Yung 14:59 on 2020-08-22 Permalink
That’s the spirit, jeather. Lay out the law for them.
Kate 19:47 on 2020-08-22 Permalink
david∞, big cities are often atypical of the hinterland culture. This has probably been true since the days of Athens and Rome, if not of Jericho and Mohenjo-daro, but is accentuated now with easy intercontinental travel and immigration. The city is always going to be more polyglot, more heterogeneous, than the countryside and its small towns.
Trying really hard to make Montreal into Joliette writ large is never going to work. The idea might fly as sales copy for the CAQ, but it’s both futile and damaging to Montreal’s future.
jeather 22:48 on 2020-08-22 Permalink
If they are trying to lay down the law for me, why shouldn’t I do the reverse? I speak French fluently (though as a clear second language). I support excellent French lessons in English schools (there’s a reason that immersion and bilingual schools are popular in the English system).
But honestly, I have asked people why they think my family, who came here speaking neither French nor English, chose English: the answer is, of course, that we weren’t allowed in the French schools.
steph 08:41 on 2020-08-23 Permalink
Can we get a serious serperatist political group started to split the island off from the rest of the province? (no clowns!). They’ll be happy – we’ll be happy – ROC can continue to complain about equalization payments .
Kate 10:23 on 2020-08-23 Permalink
steph, not surprisingly, the idea has been floated before, and smacked down hard. Dumont knows that there’s still a wave of people who’d like to make Montreal an exception to language laws – “Il y aura encore des voix à Montréal qui réclameront de soustraire la métropole aux lois du Québec.” This article is a plea not to do so.
Separatism is still around. This weekend, Gérard Bouchard pleads for Quebec sovereignty in Le Devoir. I can’t say I find his arguments compelling. During a pandemic would be no time to break up the country, but nationalism isn’t based on logic.
Kevin 16:30 on 2020-08-23 Permalink
There are times I wish Parizeau had sent Quebecers to the psychiatrist’s office instead of the dentist.