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Uh huh. Do you even know who that woman is in the article you posted? Do you stop to consider that there can be political motivations behind journalism and political figures? If you are older than 16, it should be clear, right? Don't believe everything you read?
Do you know French? Have you sat down and read reports about the language from those who do not hold an anglophone perspective?
I speak both, English being my first language, French being what I use in daily life. As an ESL teacher, I frequently read opinions like yours but they are massively misinformed.
If you really want to get picky about it, all languages die and are reborn as centuries go on
And I would imagine most experts agree that the most effective way to preserve a language is by promoting it on its own merits, not by putting restrictions on other languages.
Maybe we should talk about the Egyptian language because you folks are in de Nile.
It's been indisputable for some time that English is becoming the ‘universal language’. As the number of living languages has steadily decreased, the use of English has expanded on every continent. And though English has not — despite predictions — crushed all other languages (German, Russian, and Spanish, to cite the prime examples, all remain strong), one language does seem to be undergoing the predicted cataclysmic collapse. English may not yet have won the globe, but French has definitely lost it...
...More dramatically, in Zaire, in 1997, fueled by anti-French sentiment, the French language was replaced with native languages...
...Across Europe, French has gradually declined from being the lingua franca to falling behind German and English...
...English, meanwhile, is becoming the most important Western language in Africa, replacing both French and Portuguese...
...Former French-speaking colonies beyond Africa have been hostile to the French language. French has been collapsing even faster in Asia than it is in Africa...
...French has also seen a drastic decline in North America. In the U.S., between 1990 and 1995, college applicants for French class declined by twenty-four percent...
...While once the language of culture, French has been pushed off the global stage....
...The calamitous decline in French seems irreversible, even to the French. In 2008, the budget of La Francophonie, the governing body of the French language, was six million euros; in contrast, the British Council announced it would spend 150 million euros in efforts to advance English...
Hell, even your own supporters acknowledge the decline in your own back yard.
And I don't know where you're getting the idea that former French colonies as a whole are hostile to French. Most education in the Francophonie occurs in French...Kinshasa is the second biggest Francophone city in the world and were the hosts of the last summit of La Francophonie in 2012. Many urban Lebanese, Tunisians and Moroccans preferentially speak French over Arabic.
"At my school it's more cool to speak French. Arabic is looked down upon,"
The GDP of the Francophonie as an aggregate is over 4 trillion dollars. You're an IDIOT if you think French is irrelevant. Is it in decline relative to English? Yes, as is every other language save for Mandarin. Is it in absolute decline? No. Step outside of your bubble, while I can travel to more places as an anglophone than my father could 25 years ago, I'm no more restricted by being Francophone today than my mother was 25 years ago.
The reasons that Europeans are multilingual and Canadians aren't are simple: necessity and distance.
English is the language of the world, any info you need wi be in English, if you're in shanghai and lost you'll surely find someone eh speaks enough english to help you out. If someone only speaks Dutch or Finnish then their access to info will be greatly curtailed. As we know, even if you translate something - meanings get lost and it's not the same
Also distance, in America and Canada you can drive 1000 miles, stop to get food and be spoken to in English, In holland if you drive 1000 miles you're gonna have to know some french/German or something to order that same Big Mac. So instead of learning every European langauge people just learn English and those of two different cultures can communicate.
If Canadians/Americans needed to learn french or Spanish to travel short distances or have access to information, they would. But they don't have too, so they don't. The only non immigrant (or child of immigrant) people in Anglo America that know any other language besides simple phrases like "bonjour" or "hola como estas" are really internationally minded people (aka someone who is really into Italian culture or wants to live in France) or the highly educated. Whereas in Sweden/Holland even the bus driver or janitor will speak English. Try finding a bus driver in NY or Toronto that speaks Dutch or Swedish..lol
No, you cannot compare Spanish in America with the official bilingualism in Canada because only around 12% of Americans speak Spanish, and the language of the road signs, work and federal government is English only even in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods and those states close to Mexico. I had no problem speaking English only in Miami and I also heard quite large number of French speakers there as well.
Let's look at the numbers here:
Population of America: 314 million
Population of Canada: 35 million
12% of 314 million = 37.68 million.
There are more people speaking Spanish in the United States than the entire population of Canada.
So yes, you can compare Spanish in America to French in Canada. Spanish appears to be more popular in North America than French is by a ridiculously large margin.
Population of America: 314 million
Population of Canada: 35 million
12% of 314 million = 37.68 million.
There are more people speaking Spanish in the United States than the entire population of Canada.
So yes, you can compare Spanish in America to French in Canada. Spanish appears to be more popular in North America than French is by a ridiculously large margin.
'
I don't see what popularity has to do with this. This is more related to official legal status, geographic distribution and concentration, how many people migrated from the old country at one point, how many babies particular groups tended to have, and the propensity of certain groups to migrate to the contemporary United States.
Population of America: 314 million
Population of Canada: 35 million
12% of 314 million = 37.68 million.
There are more people speaking Spanish in the United States than the entire population of Canada.
So yes, you can compare Spanish in America to French in Canada. Spanish appears to be more popular in North America than French is by a ridiculously large margin.
No, not really.
Spanish is a language of immigrants in the United States. Americans speak English. French in Canada, unlike Spanish in America, is not an immigrant language, but the language of Canadians.
French was the original language of Canada and even after the British conquest was the majority language into the mid 1800's and the term "Canadian" referred to a French speaking person well into that era. Spanish on the other hand, was the language of a few thousand people in the southwestern US upon conquest, and the vast, vast majority of Spanish speakers in the US or immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. The only area with significant speakers of Spanish until the recent wave of mass Latino immigration was New Mexico. There is nowhere in the US remotely similar to Quebec in terms of Spanish being the language of a semi-autonomous nation within a larger state. Spanish is to the US what Chinese or Punjabi is to Canada. French is to Canada what English is to the United States.
Even if we are to talk about "popularity", for whatever reasons, French is more popular considering the number of native speakers. The number of students studying French in the US is second only to Spanish, despite there being far more Chinese, Tagalog, Russian or (insert language) speakers. Spanish is popular because of incredible rates of mass immigration, and sky-high birth rates, but French remains more popular than other languages despite having a relatively small base of native speakers.
I wish to death that I had been enrolled in French immersion as a child, I really do. In Ontario, speaking French is the single most lucrative thing you can do for yourself short of earning a Master's degree.
And German is even worse for that. I think what turned a lot of people off learning German when I was in school was the endless parade of der, die and das.
When my kids took German they had a tough time learning German..the Grammar was tough for them but eventually they managed,it helped that they had a German Mom
I came over 35 years ago to Canada and already at that time I was taught in Germany Latin,German,English and I took French. My parents refreshed their French knowledge at that time for they knew English and French was spoken in Canada. When my 4 children started school I made sure they took French and German all the way up to high school and they continued on in University. At times they hated me for pushing them so hard, but it payed of for now they have jobs where they need to use their French language skills and just yesterday one was saying "my French came in really handy the other day : I do believe when a country ,in this case Canada offers you 2 languages you should learn them. When I visited other countries like the Punjab/India I learned to speak Punjabi and again it helped that DH speaks fluent Punjabi and Hindi
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