this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Elaborate on that, bucko.
A Parisian expert in French literature failed Quebec's "French Proficiency Exam", not to mention how other languages don't get anything close to the pedestal treatment English and French get under Canada's official bilingualism. One of Trudeau's cabinet was subjected to quebecoise nationalist mistreatment because she spoke an indigenous language instead of French.
And BTW, I'm saying that as someone of Quebecoise descent, likely pure laine as recently as my grandmother.
Your response was a relief; as the emoji I posted was indicating, I was worried it was some frothing about pronoun preferences having some legal protections.
Nah, I just think official language status is a violation of free speech, and of the natural development and evolution of culture.
I mean just look at France and Quebec in contrast, motherland French and Quebecoise French are nearly separate languages from each other with how incomprehensible they can be to each other, and yet both Quebec and France have strict prescriptivist official language policies in place supposedly in the name of "preserving the French language."
If there was any sort of naturalness to any of it they'd rigidly have maintained the same exact language with all the same linguistic conventions, and yet that has not happened at all, debunking the supposed entire point of this farce in the first place.
The only reason to maintain it at this point is that it excludes the lower classes from public office and official spaces, since they are the most likely to diverge from a prescribed cultural structure, and you can see that in Ontario where francophones raised riot when funds were beginning to be allocated for the language support of Indian and Chinese languages that actually had more speakers within Ontario than French did. It's not about preserving a minority language, it's about refusing the rights of immigrants to have their languages accommodated as well.