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."

Comments

Re:Maybe this is one thing we should let be?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an advocate of freedom of speach, and I do think the law is silly in this case, but there are more pressing battles to be fought. These people wern't arrested, they wern't censored, and they wern't forced out of buisness.

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!

Tongue Troops

[geophile]

I was at McGill University in Montreal when these absurd laws were passed. The DMCA looks sane in comparison. These language laws specify things like the relative font sizes of English and French signs in various contexts, and whether English is permitted at all. Every so often, these "Tongue Troops" as they were known would do something really spectacular and land on the front page of the regional or national newspapers. For example, there was the time they forced an English language bookstore to replace interior English signs with French ones. Then there was the suggested list of French terms for English words that had polluted French. For example, I think they suggested something like "hambourgeois" to replace "hamburger", which is in common use by everyone. When these laws went into effect, I think I remember reading that the only similar laws existed in Libya.

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.

La Oueb

[screwballicus]

As a linguistics student, I find the Quebec government's stance not only frustrating, but poorly informed. It's almost comical that, in its attempt to preserve French, Quebec has made its language far less viable for trade by restrictive language laws (where trade has traditionally been the most important vehicle for the survival of non-insular languages) and, furthermore, has begun policing within its own language in the sort of vain attempt that has often led, in the past, to the creation of "vulgar" and "high" varieties of language (e.g., In the creation of Katharevusa as a "pure" form of Greek, lacking the borrowed vocabulary of Demotic).

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.