Information about Quebec city, we're interested in moving...

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by myItalianlovesSnow

Well, it is my point about the same kinds of situation in the US, it really erks me!! If you want to move to another country you should also want and know you need to embrace all the changes, including language if it is different than yours. Here, we have people who purposely pretend they don't know English just to try and take advantage, like in any service where something is sold, they might pretend they don't understand the dollar amount and give you $5.00 and then say they dont understand...and expect to get it for the price they try and rip you off for....ridiculous. Not all people are like this, but a lot of them are, they are taught this way and even put their kids up to the same thing. When I was in High School, white folks were the minority, I would say that probably 75% of the school was hispanic decent and the rest between Italian and other white nationalities. During tests or things like that, some of the kids would go to a counselor who spoke english and spanish for help translating if they needed it, I remember I had to go into the office, one of our counselors was also a coach and I saw the other counselor giving them the answers. So, to say that I completely understand when people expect special treatment and don't want to put the effort in to learning the spoken language of a given area. Does this happen much, I think it might not be as drastic there but I dont know.

I get it, but don’t forget that in the case of Quebec, we’re not really talking about "moving to another country" for a lot of the people who want to speak English here.

You actually have three groups involved:

- People who have been born and raised in Quebec but are primarily English-speaking. English-speaking people have lived in Quebec for more than 200 years. For them, it’s not "another place" they moved to, it is home. The issues with these people and French are gradually fading away as each passing generation gets more and more fluent in French. (Up until the late 1970s/early 1980s, most native-born anglos in Quebec did not learn French.)

- English-speaking people who move to Quebec from other parts of Canada, for whom Quebec is not "another country" either. It’s still their country, even if it does feel a bit different. I would venture to say that most of these people never learn French, often in spite of the fact they may live in Quebec for many years or even decades. It wasn’t such a big issue in recent decades because there we so few of them. (Migration was generally outward bound - with many Quebec anglos moving out and very few anglos from the rest of Canada moving in.) But now that the independence and language issues have (somewhat) subsided, there has been an increase in anglos from other parts of Canada moving to Quebec. And as I said before, a lot of these people tend to view Quebec as just another part of Canada, and not at all as a "French-speaking enclave" within their country where they have to do anything special to adapt.


- People who move to Quebec from abroad but who tend to see it as just another part of (mainly English-speaking) Canada, and who learn English instead of French when here, or use the English they already know a little bit before arriving - often the case for people from places like India, Pakistan, China, etc.