News Quebec law tramples English-only subtitles

You might want to sort out that quoting. I said what was posted, not Mcmonopoly.

 

i can see why you might be scared of any language police.

 

Dude in Quebec we already one of the most taxed region ever... and the government still can't deliver any services (including abysmal road condition) and still in deficit.

 

I guess French Canadians are still French...

 

And just to put it in perspective, when our Prime minister went to France to meet Sarkozy, the French President/Prime minister squarely said to our (Sovereign oriented)Quebec Prime Minister to basically "down play" the Whole sovereign country thing, that it was not in the greatest interest of our Province/country, with which I fully agree!!

 

Living there and not being Quebecois must be about as bad as living in Utah and not being a Mormon.

 

Yeah another ignorant post. The immigration numbers are through the F'n roof, why?!?! Because when you live here you can go to school (good ones) for free and that's all the way to University , get medical attention (without having to pay huge amounts of money for insurances) which requires some patience at times I must admit, but still, finding affordable housing/apartments that aren't total dumps, social groups/program for almost every f'n problem you might have....Oh and also we try and resolve our problems socially, peacefully, by relying on the government to instate programs/laws so that everybody will be happy in the end, which IMO is worth a lot.

And lucky fro me I have the chance to frequently exchange with people from so many different origins/countries/religions, so I can try and paint a bigger picture for myself, what we represent to other people, etc.

 

Switzerland has many public signs in three languages, French, German and Italian, and it's the most advanced country on earth. The Welsh (not nearly the most advanced country on earth) also have the legal right to bi-lingual road signs though only about 20% of the natives can read them and the sign-writers frequently cock up the translation.

 

The whole signs deal reminds me of when I was younger and living in Palisades Park NJ. Which has a HUGE Korean population, the mayor at the time passed a mandate that all the Korean businesses had to put up an English equivalent sign, then they went a bit far and put a curfew on Korean owned businesses(restaurants included) at 4am, while the non Korean businesses were allowed to be open 24hrs. After a few years and enough people got green cards they got a town council member and ousted the mayor and fixed a few of those things.

I think the way Quebec is going about this is all wrong and just hurts them and makes them look very arrogant. I think it is great that Quebecians are trying to save a part of who many of them are but if you truly want to save the language the people just need to use it. I speak Korean fluently and write it to, but I moved to a rural town when I was 12 where there were no Koreans let alone asians, no asian/korean media. I still got along fine I know my parents heritage etc, why? I use it at home they taught me it and there was no mandated law from Korea forcing my parents to teach me it. If something culturally is worth fighting for then you don't need laws to protect them.

 

Good example, but in the case of Switzerland, I think the different posted languages have more to do with the fact that the country is bordered in part by France, Italy and Germany, which in turn provides a greater means for the native language of the immigrants coming from each respective country to want to be uphold.

Simply put It's pretty hard not to acknowledge the fact fact that a good portion of your country's inhabitant speaks many different languages, when you can travel to and from each country IN THE SAME DAY!!

This holds true also for certain parts of the cities bordering the US/CANADA, and even in respective regions of other Provinces than Quebec( Northern Ontario holds a good % of french speaking folks, for that I can personally attest!)

 

I fully agree with your point.

But the problem with preserving our language by using it though, is how the English language is so present/embedded in the World's culture, is that it inherently affects the way we speak.

I mean for example unless you are really trying to sound like a jerk, you will use anglicized words in your sentences, Ie. I rarely say " Je vais changer mes freins sur ma voiture"(i'll change the brakes on my car) we will often say "je vais changer les ->brakes<- sur ma voiture"...You see right there, we just lost 1/8th of the french content in that sentence. And that's a simple example.

Note that I don't converse with younger people or have to deal with them veru often (i Hate kids sorry), so I can't testify on the state of the current spoken french used by the new generations, but with all the ways they are exposed to the world, I am pretty sure they use even more English words than we did...

And IMHO, the reason I think we do that is the fact that from the point when North America became "industrialized" every one wanted to adopt to US standards/terms/etc., thus giving them a chance to exchange in goods/services without having to experience social clashes, that we got assimilated a bit by that, and now we are stuck with a linguistic melting pot in which we find the French language to be a small minority.

Best example of this is the Imperial measuring system, why is it still present in my everyday work, since we are an Official Metric country?!?! Heck even THE UK has switched to the Metric system?!? in the 1800's!! Why because since the US are still using the imperial system, and since they are the country with which we mostly do business, we cave in to their standards still (the US are 1out of the only 3 officially remaining Imperial countries, according to this chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SI-metrication-world.png)

 

oh and just to let everyone know, that article/title is wrong and misleading in many ways : [From article]..."French language rules on video games come into force today prohibiting the sale of new English-only video games in Quebec if a French version is available. That's a freaking difference from "ALL GAMES WILL REQUIRE ENGLISH SUBTITLES" Doesn't it?!

And BTW the law has been that way for a long time, maybe they just didn't enforce it that much.

That why I hate regurgitated Stories from other sites..LOL Get you facts right!!

 

Please don't go and say that others don't have an heritage that are worth saving, that is just doing the same thing as many others.
but honestly if you find the frence language and your heritage so important, then why are you not in france? whenever you move to a diffrent contry you ajust to their culture. I have lived in the US for a year, (highschool) and lived with mormons (or the churtch of latter day saints as they say), have lived in Australia for a month, and are currently living in Germany. if you find the culture of the contry you are ind great, you stay AND AJUST TO THE CULTURE, if you don't, leave..

I don't know why but doing something like this seems to be common to french people... I have been in france, in a turist area, I could speak english an a little german, (I am Dane but don't count on anybody speaking Danish) I thought that was enough to get along... how disappointed I was, didn't meet one single french person that spoke any other language than french...

by the way thank you for having the guts to write what you do, I know you get a lot of S***t for it

 

Don't all these things apply to Canada overall, not just Quebec? Or are you saying that Canadians are flocking to become Quebecois?

 

I know they need to have signs and stuff in both languages in Quebec and there is nothing wrong with that.

But there are places where it is only french and where english is not even allowed at all and non-tourists can get in trouble for speaking english. And supposedly there is 'language police' that will fine you or whatever for speaking english. This is according to people I know who have been to Quebec. Is that actually true?

IMO it should never be pure 100% french as Canada is an english country. If it is a french area then have the signs in both languages, but they should not be allowed to have law to only have french and no english.

Didn't the french lose the war?



What about all those rental cars in southern US? If anyone knows about that......

 

No but they don't seem to mind that much when they come to Quebec, since they do have a choice to where they want to live...

 

It seems you didn't catch what I was trying to do here...In no way was that directed or intended to offend or to be malicious towards anyone, I was just acting like the typical Canadian Joe, that only likes to pick on everything we are trying to achieve , by saying bad/stupid things, that never add up to insightful arguments/conversations! That's all, saying that we should suck it up and shut up is in no way an argument, but comment made here where going towards that, and I was just pointing out that if I wanted to drum up stupid/hurtful replies, I was able to do so quite effectively, but since I tend to try and keep cool and debate my differing opinions, I felt I had to point it out.

 

Ugh, the ol' language excuse

Being an Ontario resident (yay Canada!) I certainly hear enough of this crazy culture/language stuff on the news all the time. Here are my thoughts:

Language. Don't care. Language is meerly a form of expression. I would be perfectly happy if the everyone was forced to learn one language (English, German, Japanese, French, don't really care. Although I would kind of lean towards Japanese for the cool factor). Certainly you couldn't achieve the desired result with this generation (certain elements of certain languages have to be developed by a certain age, or they are near impossible to pick up), but the next one for sure. It would be worth it just to be able to go to a foreign country (or to Quebec) and not have a permanent "WTF are you saying" look on my face the whole time. Of course people try to defend their choosen language (we've all kind of been conditioned that way), but really as long as people understand what you're saying why the hell does it matter?

Culture. Don't care. If people think it's cool it will keep rolling, if not it will die. Stick it in a book and maybe someone will try reviving it someday. New culture is being formed everyday, lets keep the ball rolling. Certainly I appreciate and even like a lot of cultural stuff, but it doesn't need some sort of active defense. My very experiencing it/enjoying it/passing it on will keep it alive for me and anyone else who enjoys it.

On another note it just riles me that what appears to be a small group of people have managed to dick over Quebec's image to make all Quebec residents look like assholes. Gilles Duceppe and various other political figures have done a fantastic job of this. I mean, no offense, but you'd have to be pretty stuck up to think that Quebec could just split off from Canada and go on merrily. Of course any province would have to be pretty stuck up to think like that. We have to stick together bros! Or the US of A will pick us off one by one! Alberta's developing weapons of mass destruction, better invade them! Oh wait, nope, just here for the oil....