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

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.