Right now French and English are the official languages of Canada. There are the English parts (the majority of the country) and the French parts (the biggest being Quebec). But it seems to me that the French-speaking parts punch well above their weight culturally. Because their language insulates them from the strong US cultural influence, giving them space to develop their own unique cultural identity and not have to compete with US media. So it would be a big cultural upgrade if all of Canada spoke French. Plus the French language is cool. Wouldn’t it just be cooler if we all spoke French more?
Q: But how would that work?
A: Good question. Well French immersion is already really common (when English-speaking families sent their kids to French-speaking school). What we need to do is make all schools French immersion, and once we have a generation fluent in French we can begin the process of slowly purging the English language from any sort of government institution. Overtime people will be speaking French so much that it will seep into their private lives and they’ll just speak French at home.
Q: But wouldn’t a policy like this be massively unpopular and cause widespread backlash?
A: Absolutely it would that’s why it’s an unpopular opinion. But in an ideal world, we would do it. 🇨🇦🇫🇷
If anyone wanted to phase out English in favour of some indigenous languages I would be in favour if that too.
Edit for spelling
Another edit: why are you guys downvoting this for disagreeing, you’re supposed to disagree thats the point of this sub
Upvoted for truly being an unpopular opinion.
Yes.
Being or speaking French is the worse.
Nice try, Quebec.
To be fair, I’m in favor of making all schools French immersion. I wish I had that option growing up, being bilingual is great for multiple reasons. But “purging” English is an objectively bad idea.
“Hey, you know that language that is one of the most commonly spoken internationally? Yeah, it’s one of the languages that allows people to communicate among many of the most influential countries in the world and opens up a ton of job opportunities? Yeah, that one. Fuck that language, let’s cripple future generations by intentionally removing it from our culture, and lose a huge portion of our culture with it.”
So yeah, take my upvote.
“Hey, you know that language that is one of the most commonly spoken internationally?
French is projected to be the most common language internationally by the end of the century, due to population growth in Africa and the stagnation of population growth basically everywhere else. If Africa’s economic development goes well that might also translate to more job opportunities, but that’s a lot harder to predict.
If French becomes the dominant international language, then Canadians will naturally want to learn it. That still doesn’t justify removing English, especially considering that it’s still one of the dominant languages right now.
Source?
African French (French: français africain) is the umbrella grouping of varieties of the French language spoken throughout Francophone Africa. Used mainly as a secondary language or lingua franca, it is spoken by an estimated 167 million people across 34 countries and territories,[Note 1] some of which are not Francophone, but merely members or observers of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Of these, 18 sovereign states recognize it as an official de jure language, though it is not the native tongue of the majority.[2] . . . African French speakers represent 47% of the Francophonie, making Africa the continent with the most French speakers in the world.[3][4]
From Wikipedia.
With the highest rate of population growth, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. . . . During this period, the populations of 28 African countries are projected to more than double, and by 2100, ten African countries are projected to have increased by at least a factor of five: Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia.
From the UN projections on population growth
That’s not the part that needed a source. Obviously other languages exist. Your claim about it being predict to become the most spoken language is what needs a source.
Right. That’s just an implication of the fact that (1) French is very widely spoken in Africa, and (2) the demographic weight of Africa will be increasing throughout this century by a lot (for example look at this graph if you want to see the relative proportions). Its population is shooting up while the population of everywhere else is projected to shoot right down. So even if French doesn’t fully replace English it’s undeniable that its global usage will grow substantially
Edit: here’s another link for you to check out if you’re still don’t believe that French is, indeed, the fasted growing language right now.
The TL;DR:
A study by investment bank Natixis even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin.
French is projected to be the most common language internationally by the end of the century, due to population growth in Africa and the stagnation of population growth basically everywhere else.
普通话 has entered the Chat
But the population of China will start to decrease soon if it isn’t already, whereas the population of Africa is booming and will continue to boom for quite some time. And Mandarin is pretty localized to China, without much currency outside the country. In contrast French is an international language used around the world
Edit: or maybe I’m misreading your comment and that was already your point
You don’t need a lot of population, if you do the imperialism game correctly, you can spread your influence very far and wide.
Lets ignore the language part and just talk about the American Media… it’s influence is spread all over the world. And the US military… it’s so dominant that it’s one of the most powerful militaries in the world, if not the most powerful one… and has bases all over the world… being able to invade any small nation as it wishes to… US population isn’t even a lot lol.
(Not that I support imperialism, just sayin’)
I don’t think France can really even do any imperialism these days…
US population isn’t even a lot lol.
It is the third most populous country in the world, iirc, but I take your point
I don’t think France can really even do any imperialism these days…
France can’t. But the French Canadians? There might be untapped potential there
TIL Canada is going to conquer the world
The problem is that canadians largely don’t want to communicate with africans (not as in “they’re racist,” just as in they have no burning need to) and if they did, a large swathe of africa speaks english anyway
Canadians like talking to americans and british people. Who speak the Shakespeare tongue.
Well, we’ll see. China’s economy developed rapidly. It’s not out of the question that the same process could take place in some parts of Africa. Then there’d be a strong economic incentive to learn French.
I mean if you live in BC, you’re probably better off learning Mandarin over French.
English is the lingua franca (no, the irony is not lost on me…) of international commerce. If you remove English education from your populace then you are cutting them off from the rest of the world, economically. The only people who then will be able to comfortably buy and sell things overseas would be people who already have the spare time and money to learn a new language.
Unless you plan to get the entire rest of the world speaking primarily French as an economic vehicle as well, this is just shooting yourself in the foot. I think that ship has probably sailed already.
Veto solely because of how smug the queebs would be after the switch.
Decalisse outta here with that bullshit lol
The french language is a mess even on a good day, and should you try to speak it in France they just look at you like you’ve insulted their entire culture before switching to English.
Upvoted.
Isn’t that the whole point of speaking French within earshot of our frog-feasting friends? Bawnjoor, mayer-see mawnamee. Voolay voo un tranch duh fro-maj Americain?
Québécois insists on not keeping with actual French. At this point they shouldn’t even call it French.
Quebecois French is as French as American English is English.
I’ll just let that lie there and see how people take it. 😇
Tabernac
Well I’ll have whatever they’re having
This could be implemented quicker than you’d think. But it wouldn’t work.
“Official language” just means all government business and labelling must be in that/those language(s). There would still be English spoken everywhere, just as there are stores, services, and transactions done using other languages already.
But precisely because of that, all this would do it serve to erect a barrier around accessing government services in English. It would still be used and consumed, so there would still be uptake of American culture. Thus, it would fail to be the isolation path proposed.
It would have to be implemented slowly, and start with the school system, to prevent this kind of thing. There have been successful language elimination campaigns before, even in our own country. Usually it’s done to promote English, and it’s done as an act of cultural genocide, but still. It’s possible.
Like I said in the post I’d also be in favour of reintroducing some Indigenous languages if that means stamping out English. If we are going to carry out a language elimination campaign it might be more fair that way. A reverse uno of sorts.
I wonder if eliminating English would even be legal. Because our head of state is technically King Charles, there may be some stipulation of keeping English in there.
Might be tricky but King Charles seems like a polite fella who doesn’t want any trouble so I don’t think he’d make a big fuss about it if we changed the laws around
Everyone should learn Esperanto
Or Klingon
I am ignorant. I’ve never understood what Esperanto offers that another language doesn’t. It seems like Spanish with extra steps and fewer speakers. What’s the actual benefit?
I can see why you’d think that, but I see Esperanto as Spanish with fewer steps. No grammatical gender, two less tenses, fewer moods, and verbs don’t change form depending on the subject. “I/he talks” in Esperanto would be mi/ni estas, whereas in Spanish it would be Yo/El Hablo/Habla. Esperanto was manufactured by a linguist to be easy to learn, for use in global politics, but the French really liked being the main language used in trade/diplomacy at the time, so it all kinda fell apart.
Wow. How many incorrect statements can you pack into a paragraph about Esperanto.
- Zamenhof wasn’t a linguist. He was an ophthalmologist and an occultist who was also a polyglot. Polyglot is not the same as linguist.
- Refresh my memory. What does
<‑in>signify on nouns again? What are<li>,<ŝi>, and<ĝi>? Surely they aren’t, you know, gender, right? - Why are there inflectional tenses, moods, etc. at all. Declining for anything is not necessary. The world’s most-spoken native language has no declensions of any kind really…or one, I guess, if you squint right. (It also didn’t have gendered third-person pronouns until the 1910s, and is now reverting that ever so slowly.) Esperanto declines by gender, by tense, by aspect (and here it’s almost pseudorandom how aspects are signalled and assigned!), by mood, etc.
- It wasn’t the French who killed Esperanto. It was pretty much everybody in the world who saw no point in using a language that was almost as difficult to learn as French, but hey! at least you couldn’t talk to anybody in it for any reasonable value of “anybody”.
- Esperanto is “easy to learn” iff you have command of at least two Continental languages, ideally a Slavic one and a Latin one. It is not easy to learn for people who come from languages without declensions. Without word forms. With particulate grammars, or with agglutinative grammars, instead of inflecting grammars. It has a phonetic inventory that is filled with little landmines like the
⟨ĥ⟩(velar fricative), the⟨ĵ⟩(voiced post-alveolar fricative), and the⟨r⟩(trill) … and this is before we even start talking about assimilation rules. And the plethora of stringed consonants. Why not just be honest and say “this language is for (some) European speakers only” and be done with it?
Esperanto is only marginally easier (at best!) to learn than to learn actually useful world languages like English, French, Arabic, Mandarin, etc. but hey, at least you can speak to up to 1K/30K-2M L1/L2 speakers (estimates vary … dramatically!) instead of 390M/1.1B (English), 74M/238M (French), 315M/90M (Arabic), and 990M/194M (Mandarin).
hello!
- you are right, but i think we can agree that calling attention to the difference between a linguist and a polyglot who made an auxlang is pedantic.
- all nouns in esperanto end in “o”, unlike in spanish, where “libro” (book) is masculine and puerta (door) is feminine (there are less obvious examples like “lapiz”, masculine). I think its fair to say that esperanto has un-gendered nouns since you cannot delineate a gender from just looking at the noun itsself. any source on esperanto will corroborate this.
- i dont neccesarily disagree with you about this, but esperanto does have fewer moods than spanish, so id call it easier than spanish on that front. it also has fewer declensions than russian (to my knowledge)
- i say the french did it beause Gabriel Hanotaux was the one league of nations representative who didnt want to adopt it for international relations. esperanto is notably easier to learn than french on account of the ungendered nouns, fewer moods, etc. I think it would make sense for politicians to learn it and we avoid all the translator BS.
we can agree that calling attention to the difference between a linguist and a polyglot who made an auxlang is pedantic
No. We can’t. The difference between a linguist and a polyglot are the core reason why Esperanto is such a disaster as an “international language”. Zamenhof (like most polyglots without at least some education in linguistics, even if that education is mostly auto-didactic) had no clue how language is structured. He had no idea what a phonetic inventory is and what other languages outside of his narrow sphere had. He had no idea what allophony is and “resolved” the allophony issues by avoiding talking about it at all, really. He had no idea what grammatical structures were in use in the world to find something suited to as many of those as possible.
He didn’t know language. He knew a handful of (related) languages. There’s a huge difference here.
I think its fair to say that esperanto has un-gendered nouns since you cannot delineate a gender from just looking at the noun itsself.
Are you smoking something?
<patro>vs.<patrino>. One is masculine, the other is feminine. How do you tell? You look at the noun itself. THIS IS GENDERED NOUNS! Now how about<ĉevalo>vs.<ĉevalino>? Indeed the Fundamento has<studento>and<studentino>because things are masculine by default. A female student is a different word from a male student, both being gendered nouns.So, no, it’s not “fair to say” that the nouns are un-gendered since you can trivially delineate a gender from looking at a noun.
but esperanto does have fewer moods than spanish, so id call it easier than spanish on that front. it also has fewer declensions than russian (to my knowledge)
And it has literally infinitely more declensions than Mandarin (and a lot more languages in the Sino-Tibetan sphere).
esperanto is notably easier to learn than french on account of the ungendered nouns, fewer moods, etc.
To someone already familiar with specifically Continental European languages (at least two), sure. But to a speaker of Mandarin, or Tibetan, or Korean, or Japanese, or … well, a metric ton of languages (I haven’t even touched three more continents!) there’s no meaningful difference in complexity. But there’s a HUGE difference in utility.
i say the french did it beause Gabriel Hanotaux was the one league of nations representative who didnt want to adopt it for international relations
One person vetoed it for one use case once a long time ago (1922).
What’s the excuse for the remaining century and a bit? (Hint: It rhymes with “not good enough to be worth learning given its complete lack of users” because identical rhyme is still rhyme.)
I’ll concede the whole argument because you’re well informed, but you’ve kinda just been an asshole from moment one. Do you want information exchange or do you want to be right?
What “exchange” takes place when one side is saying things that are flatly incorrect? Facts don’t care about your feelings and all that jazz.
Mi konsentas!
as an english canadian, sure. that would be fine with me. cheers bud.
Non
Interesting to note is a lot of Francophones I’ve spoken to in the public service wouldn’t get “exempt” status on their French profile if they had to take the test.
je ne comprends pas
Guilty lol
actuary ,you have a point. As an Australian i thank we should change our language to French as well
Now that’s the spirit. Thank you. After so many negative comments, reading this was like drinking a nice cold glass of water. I am 100% in favour of francophone Aussies
I think we should settle on Ngomburr
As if Canadians aren’t ridiculous enough already.
But it seems to me that the French-speaking parts punch well above their weight culturally.
Does it? How are you evaluating this?
Poutine is from Quebec. The best hockey team in the NHL is from Quebec. Also in Quebec they consume far more media produced locally. Manitoba is the only province in Canada that was founded in an act of rebellion, in large part because Louis Riel didn’t want the British to take away the French language rights (and that’s a big part of the history of that province, and French is still widely spoken in Manitoba such as in St Boniface and some town whose name I can’t remember). Etc.
Also in Quebec they consume far more media produced locally.
Of course they do. French speaking media is less available.
Your reasoning isn’t Quebec influences culture, but Quebec influences culture in Quebec.
Your reasoning isn’t Quebec influences culture, but Quebec influences culture in Quebec.
Their local culture is home-grown, not imported. That’s what I’m aiming for. I don’t care about soft power projections, I would just think it would be better if Canada had a more homegrown, sovereign culture, rather than importing a lot of our culture from the US.
Quebec has the highest tax rate in Canada, and is the only province to spend as much as 2% of tax revenue on subsidies for culture and media. Without this, there would be very little homegrown media, as the foreign sale market is so much smaller.
So good news, you don’t have to speak French, just pay more tax and spend it on culture.
Yeah but then we also have to compete with American media, which is a massive market, literally the biggest media market in human history. I don’t have high hopes
The American media empire has been completely in the shitter for over a decade, it’s ripe for takeover from anyone who has even the slightest amount of respect for their own art.
A surprising amount of “US Culture” is at least partly created in Canada and has more global influence. Y’all need to be more subversive: build up the Vancouver film industry to take over from within. I’m sure my countrymen would be on their knees begging for it, if you toss a few coins their way
Poutine is from Quebec. The best hockey team in the NHL is from Quebec.
I wouldn’t say the NHL is a major soft-power thing globally. It’s not bad, I guess. But it’s not like only Canada is of note in that area.
Also in Quebec they consume far more media produced locally.
True, but the media produced locally is not really consumed internationally. My point was about soft power here.
Soft power is nice, but in this post I am more concerned with squishy power, i.e. the power to have sovereignty over your own culture, even if your culture isn’t exported outward
For heavens sake, no. Better turn the Canadian flag into one that shows eleven beavers pissing on a frog.
