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Quebec language Police Fine English-Only Site
Navarre writes: "The Quebec government continues to embarrass itself by missing the entire point of the internet. The language police are at it again, by fining an English-only website operating within the province. They didn't care that the owners of the site were selling to English-only customers outside of the province. If they would take their blinders off and join the 21st century, they would see that all they are doing is driving business out of Quebec by forcing these people to find their internet hosting elsewhere."
As anybody who has taken intro to linguistics can tell you (that's all I've taken ;) ), one of the primary ways language evolves is by picking up things by other languages.
One of the other things you learn is that The Man (in whatever form) insists that the language is deteriorating and the world will end if the language changes.
At the end of the day, the language changes, and the world doesn't end. And the language police (in the U.S., english teachers) pick a new thing and say 'if this changes, the world will end.'
The only result is that people have a much more difficult time with their lives, because they must learn a different dialect from what they actually speak to be accepted into society.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
I can't remember the name of the guy, or probably the entire story correctly -- but I', sure some sociology major is reading this and can get us some info?
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I understand people wanting to preserve culture (etc.) but at gunpoint? What does this say about Quebec (and France) that they must legislate the use of French? Doesn't that fact alone mean the battle has been lost?
Ah well. The rantings of an English-speaking American...
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-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
There were alot more English speaking people in Quebec back then, 25% throughout the province, and 50% in Montreal. Now it's more like 10%/35%. These laws were brought in place by the French majority with the goal of oppressing the english and encouraging them to leave. And it worked, they have driven hundreds of thousands of english people out of the province over the past 30 years, myself included last year.
after all, it is the language that the great majority of people in that province speak!
Spoken like a true oppressor. If we follow your logic, the federal government should pass laws enforcing the use of english since the great majority of people speak English in Canada. Oh what, now you don't think things are fair?
Now, I still fail to see how insisting that both languages be used somehow hinders your free speech... just speak freely in both languages!
That is complete utter crap. The provicial government passed laws banning the use of english signs, the law was over ruled in the early 90's when some people complained to the U.N. and the U.N. forced the Quebec governement to change it's laws. That's the only reason english signs are allowed. If the P.Q. fundamentalist had their way, it would even be illegal for english schools to exist.
It is a simple matter of preventing a strong culture to disappear amidst the mass of american culture surrounding it.
If a culture is strong, it does not need protection. The English Canadian Culture does quite well without any protection and we are even more exposed to american influence then the french. I still insist on using "colour" and "night", not "color" and "nite"; I like hockey, not basketball (well, technically that's Canadian too); I drink Beer, not watered down horse piss; guns suck, healthcare rulez, etc, etc. How many Canadians do you see wrapping themselves in the American flags saying "Praise the Lord, pass me my gun"?
There is nothing to it about preventing free speech.
The U.N dissagreed.
btw, on the suject of the article, this is not the first time the Language Police has gone after internet sites, the first and most famous case was against microbytes.
RE: How many Canadians do you see wrapping themselves in the American flags saying "Praise the Lord, pass me my gun"?
Me and many other brain-drainers who took Chretien up on his oft-repeated line "hiff you doan like hawl dem tax, den you can leaf for da younited state."
I'll leave your schizophrenic (Albertan fundamentalists on one side, Quebecois militants on theother), rights-removing, tax-fattened, opportunity starved, falling to pieces by the day socialist paradise.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Just curious.
OK,
- B
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We can all thank Trudeau for a worthless constitution which allows for such nonsense.
Ironically, no. Trudeau wanted a Charter of Rights & Freedoms without exceptions. He was dead-set against the "not-withstanding" clause (for our American cousins: it allows Provinces to ignore the Charter anytime they don't want to).
So who talked him into it?
Jean Chretien
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
They have and will again.
<sarcarsm> The French language is under constant attack in Quebec and needs to be propped up by Draconion Thought Police or it may vanish forever! Didn't you know? </sarcasm>
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
I see. As long as you don't force somebody to take down a politically offensive website (where "politically offensive" is defined as "in English" by the Canadian authorities), it isn't censorship. So it wouldn't be censorship to fine a person for saying something "wrong", and eventually bankrupt them.
Right. Face fine for speaking your mind. That's not censorship.
Correct me where I'm wrong, but free speech does, to a certain extent, mean "free as in beer". In other words, I don't have to pay the government for the right to speak my mind. And I don't have to pay fines for speaking offensively.
Yes, the sites can simply place French text on their websites. But goddammit, maybe speaking English is a political statement!
So as another poster has mentioned, this is nothing new in Quebec. And driving out (e-) commerce is nothing new. There was a mass exodus of businesses in the last seventies and early eighties from Montreal to Toronto.
The Pequistes who began rewriting French to be free of foreign influence (e.g., the state declared "web" to be, henceforth, "oueb") don't seem to be aware that enforcing the insular nature of Quebec French is the most efficient way they could possibly kill the language. No lingua franca, spoken by a large majority within its region, as is French, ever died because of foreign signage and loan-words. Take the below sentence, for example:
"Language is a constantly changing art"
The only words in that sentence that English didn't borrow from French are "is" and "a". "language, "constant", "change" and "art" are all French loan-words. Similarly, French borrowed them from Latin. The fact that French coexisted with English as a major language of England after the Norman conquest and lent it much of its vocabularly didn't impede English's eventual emergence as a trade language. In fact, becoming a trade language is specifically what saved English. If Quebec French attempts to isolate itself from trade and engineer a linguistic-supremicist "High French", it's sealing its own fate and assuring its demise.