Dawson enlargement regarded with distrust
The plan to enlarge Dawson College, which was on the CAQ’s to-do list, is being seen more and more as an attack on the status of French in Montreal.
QMI is not letting up in its push against English, outraged Wednesday that three quarters of the courses being offered to foreign students are in English.
I hate to have to point this out, but the global numbers from Wikipedia:
Languages by number of native speakers:
English – 379 million
French – 77.2 million
Total number of speakers:
English – 1.268 billion
French – 277 million
If you’re a person from another country with no investment in Canada’s politics, want to extend your education and brush up a major world language, English will be more useful to you. Of course French would be better if you plan to live in France or Quebec or one of the other places colonized by France, but in general, you’ll go more places with English.
I suppose QMI is more concerned that people will get some education here in English and then decide to stay. Working out how to make this impossible will be interesting.
Nick D. 14:13 on 2020-11-25 Permalink
Those numbers from wikipedia seem too low, both for English and French (just based on a quick mental arithmetic of the populations of English and French speaking countries around the world.) I wonder how reliable they are. (I love wikipedia, in general, just to be clear.) But I agree with your point.
Kate 14:20 on 2020-11-25 Permalink
Nick D., the numbers can’t be precise. There are people in China learning their English from other Chinese people who learned their English from other Chinese people who learned from some expat in a big city. How much gets lost to broken telephone over so many iterations, and do those people really count as second language users? Do Creole languages count as French or English? And so on.
But it probably gives a general sense of how English likely has 3 to 4 times as many speakers around the globe as French. Colonization followed by the dominance of the United States gave the language the edge.
MarcG 16:16 on 2020-11-25 Permalink
“1,268 billion” that comma is throwing me off – is this the correct way to write it?
Mark Côté 17:29 on 2020-11-25 Permalink
Should be a period, in English anyway.
Kevin 23:07 on 2020-11-25 Permalink
There is no legal solution to people moving out of the city.
There is no legal solution to thinking all mother-tongue anglophones are identical and interchangeable.
This is a problem with an ideological paradigm
Kate 12:56 on 2020-11-26 Permalink
MarcG and Mark Côté: You are correct, I fixed the comma.