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From: credmond@watmath.UUCP (Chris Redmond)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Multi-lingual countries
Message-ID: <3289@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 10-Nov-86 09:22:20 EST
Article-I.D.: watmath.3289
Posted: Mon Nov 10 09:22:20 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 10-Nov-86 22:15:56 EST
References: <743@argon.idec.stc.co.uk>
Reply-To: credmond@watmath.UUCP (Chris Redmond)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 37

In article <743@argon.idec.stc.co.uk> alan@idec.stc.co.uk (Alan Spreadbury) writes:
>Around the end of October, we were told on the news that Belgium was
>on the brink of civil war (all right, that's a slight exaggeration)
>because the French-speaking mayor of a French-speaking commune in
>a Flemish-speaking province was refusing to comply with a requirement
>that he attain a certain proficiency in speaking Flemish.  The matter
>was apparently complicated by the fact that the court investigating
>the dispute conducted its business in Flemish, while the mayor would
>only address it in French.
>
>What happened?  Does this sort of thing happen in other multi-lingual
>countries?  Is this the reason for Proposition whatever-it-was in
>California (making English the only official language)?
>

This sort of nonsense gets into the papers all the time in Canada, and
I don't think anybody takes it too seriously. (I have the impression
that it is sparked, as often as not, by a lawyer who wishes to help a
client fight an otherwise perfectly valid parking ticket, and persuades
a court that the ticket was written in the wrong language.)  Little
frictions are part of the price we happily pay for having a country
in which the 27 per cent French cohort can live in their own language
next door to the 73 per cent English cohort.

I have been watching with horror as the English-only advocates in the
United States point to Canada as an example of what goes wrong in a
bilingual country. What goes on here isn't a disaster, it's (usually)
a happy success, in my opinion.  And while Spanish in the United States
is an immigrant language, French and English here are the "native"
languages -- well, not native in the sense that Algonquin and Cree are
native, of course, but they are the languages in which the country grew
up in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.  We have plenty of immigrants
whose native tongues are Bengali, Chinese, Portuguese and so on --
not much Spanish, but could be a few -- and we continue to expect them
to learn English or French when they get here.

>Alan Spreadbury.