Hot take: Quebec isn't Canadian. If they don't speak the dominant language of the country, they don't belong there (and I'd say the same of English monolinguals in Quebec.)
Pro-Canada people in Québec's main argument is ''but then who will we suck payment transfers from?''
How about growing some self-reliance and dignity? It's embarassing how my fellow Quebecois were brainwashed to think that they are so dumb that WEF-aprouved Neocanada knows best.
I have an unpopular view on a 100% American and Engrish-speaking Canadian site. The French need to defend their culture and language, and they need to do so militantly. Because even though they do it, it's dying out. The fact that someone named ROUSSEAU can't speak French, speaks volumes. It's a tragedy. So much is being lost in global homogenization and making everyone and everything into a brown sludge of hot dog eating Murrican-speakers.
The fact that someone named ROUSSEAU can't speak French, speaks volumes.
Yea, it says: "French is a retarded useless romance language that no one does business in. Fuck, just try to say 78 in French, get fucked with that shit."
Murrican-speakers.
So, don't fly Air Canda, because they don't give a shit about running safe flights, they wank around over what language their CEO speaks.
Yea, it says: "French is a retarded useless romance language that no one does business in. Fuck, just try to say 78 in French, get fucked with that shit."
No, it means a lack of respect for French speakers who want to keep their culture and language. Only someone who speaks only one language (and that poorly) would say that knowing other languages is useless. Then you wouldn't mistake 78 for 98.
Business? Mon ami, life is more than the almighty green. Or are you one of the people who supports open borders because "it's good for the economy"? French should be able to remain French, not become Americans, because being fat, addicted to fentanyl and having a peanut allergy is no way to go through life.
So, don't fly Air Canda,
I don't. It has no flights in Europe.
because they don't give a shit about running safe flights,
So they're like other airlines?
they wank around over what language their CEO speaks.
Like I said, it seems unimportant to you, but when your language is dying out, it is extremely important.
It's not limited to right-wing. There's a reason the province has been trying to separate for a long time. This is a very deep seated conflict at the heart of Canada.
I wish them all the luck. Quebec needs a wake up call and to start paying for its own shit. Socialism is only good and fun when it's paid for with other people's money.
Anti-forced bilingualism is a thing for right-wing or any sane person. Only 18% of the population is bilingual, only 10% of the physical country has people speaking both regularly. 85% of the country speaks English, so if Air Canada's CEO can speak to 85% of the country I'd say that's good enough.
To disqualify >80% of candidates for something that can easily be handled by translators is absurd and only a retard would defend it. You're here defending it...
Anti-forced bilingualism is a thing for right-wing or any sane person
I'm less sympathetic given the fact that many Europeans are forced to learn English when it's not even their native language. So depriving others of their native language in service of globalization and homogenization seems much less justified.
Only 18% of the population is bilingual, only 10% of the physical country has people speaking both regularly. 85% of the country speaks English, so if Air Canada's CEO can speak to 85% of the country I'd say that's good enough.
So this means that 15% speaks only French, 18% French and English, and 67% English only?
I assume the 67% are more likely to be lower class. That is a real concern, that this would result in more elitism. On the other hand, people being protected in their native land has a higher priority to me.
To disqualify >80% of candidates for something that can easily be handled by translators is absurd and only a retard would defend it. You're here defending it...
I've never seen you be so spicy.
I sort of understand. But can you also not understand that in a country where so few people are French speakers, French can easily be swamped and assimilated into the mainstream, and people losing their language, culture and identity? It is already happening.
So this means that 15% speaks only French, 18% French and English, and 67% English only?
You are assuming "bilingual" means English/French bilingual and people who speak neither don't exist. DO NOT ASSUME SAAR!
But seriously, yes on the 18%. Probably wrong on the 15% and 67%.
In 2021, 98.1% of the population of the country could sustain a conversation in French or English. Moreover, there has never been as many bilingual Canadians, with 6,581,000 people who can conduct a conversation in English and in French, they now represent 18.0% of the Canadian population (compared to 17.9 % in 2016).
The catch is that it's 46.4% of Quebec and 9.5% of the rest of Canada.
Although the number of bilingual English-French individuals rose in Canada outside Quebec (+53,000) from 2016 to 2021, the English-French bilingualism rate decreased, falling from 9.8% to 9.5%. This is due to faster growth in the number of people who can conduct a conversation only in English, or in neither English nor French.
And only 3.3% of Canadians outside of Quebec have French as a mother tongue. It really is one province holding the rest of the country hostage over this shit. Now watch as they replace him as CEO with either a woman who does speak French or an Indian who barely speaks even English, but they'll be afraid to point out.
English is the global language of business, it has tremendous value for anyone to learn, yes we're privileged to have it be our mother tongue. English culture is also huge so they have lots of exposure to it. Even if "forced" it's a great service to the "forced" that opens up pretty much the entire world to them.
So this means that 15% speaks only French, 18% French and English, and 67% English only?
According to the 2016 census, a total of 86.2% of Canadians could conduct a conversation in English, while 29.8% could conduct a conversation in French. 18.12% can do both- 11.25% are French only & 69.54% English only.
French people's native land is France, France surrendered Quebec to the English in 1763- they've had 260+ years to move if that's they're highest priority. French language is also insanely protected in Quebec, you seem to be quite ignorant of the French language in Canada if you think it's under any real threat.
The idea that a CEO would spend 600 valuable hours he could've spent learning how to run a better airline to learn a fake & gay language- and that FUCKING FRENCH is the issue after PEOPLE DIED IN A FUCKING PLANE CRASH is completely leftist retarded bullshit. It's 2026 the translation services (even the artificial ones) in modern day are insanely good. If subtitles wasn't good enough just say "ok next time we'll have a French spokesperson repeat the CEO's message". Should have been more than enough for this non-issue.
You're losing the plot. We're talking about a CEO here. It's literally only about the green.
French should be able to remain French
It already does. Whether the CEO of an airline speaks it or not is completely and totally immaterial. If you make it a factor then, get used to speaking English, because you are doing more damage to your own language than anyone else.
Doesn't sound like those lessons did him any good. He didn't even TRY to speak French when adressing the death of a French speaking employee.
It's not the first time he got in hot water over this, so it really feels like he doesn't give a damn. It's not like Quebeckers expect fluent French, just the will to try.
Which is why forced bilingualism is bullshit. In Canada there's maybe 10% of the physical country where you will regularly use both languages so expected people to be fluent in both means you're eliminating the overwhelming majority of eligible candidates.
Some friends told me about a story that happened about 20 years back. Their first language was English, but they'd lived in Quebec practically their entire lives. They'd been immersed in a majority French culture for nearly two decades and had been taking French lessons with actual French Quebecers at school throughout that time, so they could speak the language fluently with barely an accent or any spelling mistakes when writing. At some point when they were around 18, they went to visit some of their friends who lived in Toronto. They met them at their school, and were given a tour. When they were introduced to their French teacher, she was apparently ecstatic at the opportunity to speak to them, and tried to start a conversation. They told me that they had to really struggle to understand the slightest word that came out of her mouth. They were completely fluent in French, but they couldn't make out what the person in charge of teaching the language at that school in Toronto was saying.
Simply taking lessons and accumulating hours isn't enough. You need to have a proper teacher, or to use a proper teaching method. You need to actually want to learn the language, and to make efforts to go about it. You need to find opportunities to speak it more often in your regular life. It's only by immersing yourself in that culture or by spending time having conversations with fluent speakers that you can really get a good grasp of it.
The difference is not pronounced enough to make it that hard to understand. More likely, it was an English person who had good knowledge of the language on paper, but who never really spent time speaking it with French people, so she didn't know how to say many of the words.
When I was learning English, I had issues with a few words, like "maple". It took me a while to learn that I'm supposed to pronounce it like "May-ple", not "Mah-ple". It also took me some time before learning that all English words, other than some prepositions and determinants, are pronounced with an emphasis on a particular syllable, while the rest are meant to essentially be half-tones that you just flow through.
In French, there are many words that have silent letters you don't pronounce at all. (English too, like the word "through", but French takes it to another level.) Words like that have those silent letters for one of two reasons: 1) either to differentiate them from other words that have similar spellings and that could cause confusion when reading them even in context, or 2) because it made the words look nicer on paper. And I'm serious about the second point, that's literally the reason many French words are spelled the way they are. So if someone who learned French only through reading tries to speak it, I wouldn't be surprised if many words end up sounding so butchered as to being unrecognizable. It's really not like German, where every letter needs to be pronounced.
But anyways, I wasn't there, and it was nearly twenty years ago, so I can't really say exactly what they meant. I vaguely recall them mention a thick English accent being the cause, which would make more sense to me than a French in a place like Toronto, but who knows.
It's also especially difficult when the languages are vastly different. Even though French and English have Latin roots they're still way off- just the idea of gendered words is a big mind fuck and you just have to remember them because there's no real internal logic. Then you have adjectives and past participles changing based on gender or number, verb tenses & conjugations change a lot, formal vs informal, etc
I took French from I think grade 4 to 12 but I lived in rural Alberta so I never used it outside of French class. I barely remember any of it, it was hard to remember stuff being young and only having a few months between class, let alone all these years later never using it.
No, it's not. It just takes time. If you don't regularly speak the language you'll get rusty. That's perfectly normal. It'll even happen to your native language if you don't speak it regularly.
Also speaking a language fluently doesn't mean you're speaking it on a perfect native level without any accent.
Linguistic doors shut on you as you get older. Tonal languages like Mandarin become near-impossible for monotone English speakers to get right, which directly affects fluency. No amount of practice and lessons will make up for that missing neuroplasticity.
So what? Why should it be my or anyone else's fucking responsibility to learn French to talk to a tiny minority of frogs who hate anglophones anyway? The difficulty of learning a language has no bearing whatsoever.
In Klingon? It's a fully developed & fleshed out language, you could go learn it if it's so fucking easy and stay fluent in it despite nobody around you speaking it.
I'm surprised you don't know that English and French are both official languages of Canada and that for about a third of Canada's population French is their native tongue. Spanish on the other is not an official language of the US.
7.8 million are native French speakers. Which is roughly 20% of the population. So if we subtract the immigrant population we actually have around 27% native French speakers amongst native Canadians. According to the 2021 census at least.
I didn't know that (for sure). But my point was that you can't criticize the English-speakers' response to the Spanish song while defending the French-speakers here. Both seem a valid defense of the national (or regional) language.
Yes, you can. Again. French is an official language of Canada. Spoken by a sizable portion of the population and being the primary language of one of its second most populous region. Expecting the CEO of its national airline to be able to speak French on a basic level is not unreasonable.
On the other hand Spanish isn't an official language of the US and is primarily spoken by illegal and legal immigrants most of whom have immigrated within the last 50 years.
Are you reading my comment correctly? You're saying that the French speakers are more justified in this than the Spanish speakers are. I agree. That's why I said that you can't say critics of the latter are unjustified while critics of the former are justified.
I agree that the superbowl thing was bad. It's the hypocrisy that annoys me. Every culture should be able to defend itself in its own country, not just English.
French is just the laurentien elites court language, it's biggest use is to keep the 'little people' at a disadvantage to learn it out of politics and government.
600 hrs? That sounds a bit far fetched Geez I stopped taking French classes after Grade 2 It's too hard Eh? lol He should of really got a French speaker to say a proper R.I.P in hindsight tho
Hot take: Quebec isn't Canadian. If they don't speak the dominant language of the country, they don't belong there (and I'd say the same of English monolinguals in Quebec.)
I'm all for leaving.
Pro-Canada people in Québec's main argument is ''but then who will we suck payment transfers from?''
How about growing some self-reliance and dignity? It's embarassing how my fellow Quebecois were brainwashed to think that they are so dumb that WEF-aprouved Neocanada knows best.
Quebecer here.
I fucking hate this shithole. Any single lady can get me out of here? id literally emirgate to fuckign iran rather than live here.
Don't limit yourself. You can marry a man for a visa, too.
Hit up u/BandageBandolier
He has low standards and smells of desperation. He would probably treat you pretty well.
I have an unpopular view on a 100% American and Engrish-speaking Canadian site. The French need to defend their culture and language, and they need to do so militantly. Because even though they do it, it's dying out. The fact that someone named ROUSSEAU can't speak French, speaks volumes. It's a tragedy. So much is being lost in global homogenization and making everyone and everything into a brown sludge of hot dog eating Murrican-speakers.
Yea, it says: "French is a retarded useless romance language that no one does business in. Fuck, just try to say 78 in French, get fucked with that shit."
So, don't fly Air Canda, because they don't give a shit about running safe flights, they wank around over what language their CEO speaks.
blech.
No, it means a lack of respect for French speakers who want to keep their culture and language. Only someone who speaks only one language (and that poorly) would say that knowing other languages is useless. Then you wouldn't mistake 78 for 98.
Business? Mon ami, life is more than the almighty green. Or are you one of the people who supports open borders because "it's good for the economy"? French should be able to remain French, not become Americans, because being fat, addicted to fentanyl and having a peanut allergy is no way to go through life.
I don't. It has no flights in Europe.
So they're like other airlines?
Like I said, it seems unimportant to you, but when your language is dying out, it is extremely important.
It's called Air CANADA not Air Quebec. Less than a quarter of Canadians speak French.
Who cares if a CEO doesn't speak this minority language? They provide service in both, so stop bitching.
It's Air Canada indeed, and French is an official language of Canada.
Is anti-French a thing in Canadian right-wing politics?
It's not limited to right-wing. There's a reason the province has been trying to separate for a long time. This is a very deep seated conflict at the heart of Canada.
It's also a reason Alberta is trying to separate.
I wish them all the luck. Quebec needs a wake up call and to start paying for its own shit. Socialism is only good and fun when it's paid for with other people's money.
Anti-forced bilingualism is a thing for right-wing or any sane person. Only 18% of the population is bilingual, only 10% of the physical country has people speaking both regularly. 85% of the country speaks English, so if Air Canada's CEO can speak to 85% of the country I'd say that's good enough.
To disqualify >80% of candidates for something that can easily be handled by translators is absurd and only a retard would defend it. You're here defending it...
I'm less sympathetic given the fact that many Europeans are forced to learn English when it's not even their native language. So depriving others of their native language in service of globalization and homogenization seems much less justified.
So this means that 15% speaks only French, 18% French and English, and 67% English only?
I assume the 67% are more likely to be lower class. That is a real concern, that this would result in more elitism. On the other hand, people being protected in their native land has a higher priority to me.
I've never seen you be so spicy.
I sort of understand. But can you also not understand that in a country where so few people are French speakers, French can easily be swamped and assimilated into the mainstream, and people losing their language, culture and identity? It is already happening.
You are assuming "bilingual" means English/French bilingual and people who speak neither don't exist. DO NOT ASSUME SAAR!
But seriously, yes on the 18%. Probably wrong on the 15% and 67%.
The catch is that it's 46.4% of Quebec and 9.5% of the rest of Canada.
And only 3.3% of Canadians outside of Quebec have French as a mother tongue. It really is one province holding the rest of the country hostage over this shit. Now watch as they replace him as CEO with either a woman who does speak French or an Indian who barely speaks even English, but they'll be afraid to point out.
[https://search.open.canada.ca/qpnotes/record/pch,PCH-2023-QP-00010]
English is the global language of business, it has tremendous value for anyone to learn, yes we're privileged to have it be our mother tongue. English culture is also huge so they have lots of exposure to it. Even if "forced" it's a great service to the "forced" that opens up pretty much the entire world to them.
According to the 2016 census, a total of 86.2% of Canadians could conduct a conversation in English, while 29.8% could conduct a conversation in French. 18.12% can do both- 11.25% are French only & 69.54% English only.
French people's native land is France, France surrendered Quebec to the English in 1763- they've had 260+ years to move if that's they're highest priority. French language is also insanely protected in Quebec, you seem to be quite ignorant of the French language in Canada if you think it's under any real threat.
The idea that a CEO would spend 600 valuable hours he could've spent learning how to run a better airline to learn a fake & gay language- and that FUCKING FRENCH is the issue after PEOPLE DIED IN A FUCKING PLANE CRASH is completely leftist retarded bullshit. It's 2026 the translation services (even the artificial ones) in modern day are insanely good. If subtitles wasn't good enough just say "ok next time we'll have a French spokesperson repeat the CEO's message". Should have been more than enough for this non-issue.
You're losing the plot. We're talking about a CEO here. It's literally only about the green.
It already does. Whether the CEO of an airline speaks it or not is completely and totally immaterial. If you make it a factor then, get used to speaking English, because you are doing more damage to your own language than anyone else.
Not at all. So you're fine with a Disney CEO pushing wokeness if the GREEN goes well? Come on.
This is salami-slicing, and it ends up with people being strangers in their own country.
How though?
If only French had their own country...
At France's current immigration rate, they won't.
Quebec will the only place where French is spoken in a few decades, while France will be speaking derka derka.
Doesn't sound like those lessons did him any good. He didn't even TRY to speak French when adressing the death of a French speaking employee.
It's not the first time he got in hot water over this, so it really feels like he doesn't give a damn. It's not like Quebeckers expect fluent French, just the will to try.
600 hrs of lessons isn't trying?
The video he did was subtitled in French, you frogs all illiterate or something?
If you don't actually speak the language you don't speak the language no matter how many lessons you supposedly took. Sounds strange but it is true.
Which is why forced bilingualism is bullshit. In Canada there's maybe 10% of the physical country where you will regularly use both languages so expected people to be fluent in both means you're eliminating the overwhelming majority of eligible candidates.
Some friends told me about a story that happened about 20 years back. Their first language was English, but they'd lived in Quebec practically their entire lives. They'd been immersed in a majority French culture for nearly two decades and had been taking French lessons with actual French Quebecers at school throughout that time, so they could speak the language fluently with barely an accent or any spelling mistakes when writing. At some point when they were around 18, they went to visit some of their friends who lived in Toronto. They met them at their school, and were given a tour. When they were introduced to their French teacher, she was apparently ecstatic at the opportunity to speak to them, and tried to start a conversation. They told me that they had to really struggle to understand the slightest word that came out of her mouth. They were completely fluent in French, but they couldn't make out what the person in charge of teaching the language at that school in Toronto was saying.
Simply taking lessons and accumulating hours isn't enough. You need to have a proper teacher, or to use a proper teaching method. You need to actually want to learn the language, and to make efforts to go about it. You need to find opportunities to speak it more often in your regular life. It's only by immersing yourself in that culture or by spending time having conversations with fluent speakers that you can really get a good grasp of it.
The French teacher may have also been speaking Parisian (aka real) French while in Quebec they speak Quebecois French which has some differences.
The difference is not pronounced enough to make it that hard to understand. More likely, it was an English person who had good knowledge of the language on paper, but who never really spent time speaking it with French people, so she didn't know how to say many of the words.
When I was learning English, I had issues with a few words, like "maple". It took me a while to learn that I'm supposed to pronounce it like "May-ple", not "Mah-ple". It also took me some time before learning that all English words, other than some prepositions and determinants, are pronounced with an emphasis on a particular syllable, while the rest are meant to essentially be half-tones that you just flow through.
In French, there are many words that have silent letters you don't pronounce at all. (English too, like the word "through", but French takes it to another level.) Words like that have those silent letters for one of two reasons: 1) either to differentiate them from other words that have similar spellings and that could cause confusion when reading them even in context, or 2) because it made the words look nicer on paper. And I'm serious about the second point, that's literally the reason many French words are spelled the way they are. So if someone who learned French only through reading tries to speak it, I wouldn't be surprised if many words end up sounding so butchered as to being unrecognizable. It's really not like German, where every letter needs to be pronounced.
But anyways, I wasn't there, and it was nearly twenty years ago, so I can't really say exactly what they meant. I vaguely recall them mention a thick English accent being the cause, which would make more sense to me than a French in a place like Toronto, but who knows.
Learning a second language isn't exactly difficult.
It is if you want to be fluent. After 10 years old you start speaking with an accent, and after 18 grammar becomes an issue.
I talk to my parents regularly, and my extended family notice the difference between me and my brother who rarely calls.
It's also especially difficult when the languages are vastly different. Even though French and English have Latin roots they're still way off- just the idea of gendered words is a big mind fuck and you just have to remember them because there's no real internal logic. Then you have adjectives and past participles changing based on gender or number, verb tenses & conjugations change a lot, formal vs informal, etc
I took French from I think grade 4 to 12 but I lived in rural Alberta so I never used it outside of French class. I barely remember any of it, it was hard to remember stuff being young and only having a few months between class, let alone all these years later never using it.
No, it's not. It just takes time. If you don't regularly speak the language you'll get rusty. That's perfectly normal. It'll even happen to your native language if you don't speak it regularly.
Also speaking a language fluently doesn't mean you're speaking it on a perfect native level without any accent.
Linguistic doors shut on you as you get older. Tonal languages like Mandarin become near-impossible for monotone English speakers to get right, which directly affects fluency. No amount of practice and lessons will make up for that missing neuroplasticity.
So what? Why should it be my or anyone else's fucking responsibility to learn French to talk to a tiny minority of frogs who hate anglophones anyway? The difficulty of learning a language has no bearing whatsoever.
Are you Canadian and want to be the CEO of Air Canada? No? Then you're in luck because nobody said you should learn French anyway.
Ok, go learn Klingon then and stay fluent in it.
OH SNAP!
Could've at least said Latin instead of a ficitional language.
Also the jokes on you. I am bilingual.
In Klingon? It's a fully developed & fleshed out language, you could go learn it if it's so fucking easy and stay fluent in it despite nobody around you speaking it.
Trying in the same way the American school system is trying in inner cities, apparently.
As if you guys didn't throw a tantrum over the superbowl's spectacle that was Spanish only... Miss me with your BS.
So if that's a tantrum, why do you agree with this? Either all of it OK, or none of it is OK.
I'm surprised you don't know that English and French are both official languages of Canada and that for about a third of Canada's population French is their native tongue. Spanish on the other is not an official language of the US.
1/5th, not 1/3rd. And only 18% of Canadians are fluent in both languages.
7.8 million are native French speakers. Which is roughly 20% of the population. So if we subtract the immigrant population we actually have around 27% native French speakers amongst native Canadians. According to the 2021 census at least.
I didn't know that (for sure). But my point was that you can't criticize the English-speakers' response to the Spanish song while defending the French-speakers here. Both seem a valid defense of the national (or regional) language.
Yes, you can. Again. French is an official language of Canada. Spoken by a sizable portion of the population and being the primary language of one of its second most populous region. Expecting the CEO of its national airline to be able to speak French on a basic level is not unreasonable.
On the other hand Spanish isn't an official language of the US and is primarily spoken by illegal and legal immigrants most of whom have immigrated within the last 50 years.
Are you reading my comment correctly? You're saying that the French speakers are more justified in this than the Spanish speakers are. I agree. That's why I said that you can't say critics of the latter are unjustified while critics of the former are justified.
I agree that the superbowl thing was bad. It's the hypocrisy that annoys me. Every culture should be able to defend itself in its own country, not just English.
That's a surprising number of hours claimed, to then be totally unable to utter 2 intelligible sentences in a language.
Moral of the story - easier not to try to placate the French
French is just the laurentien elites court language, it's biggest use is to keep the 'little people' at a disadvantage to learn it out of politics and government.
600 hrs? That sounds a bit far fetched Geez I stopped taking French classes after Grade 2 It's too hard Eh? lol He should of really got a French speaker to say a proper R.I.P in hindsight tho