This policy is already firmly in place in La belle province.
Real patriots won’t even look at quirky, English-looking pictograms littering the landscape, just another tool of opression against the French…

The issue not so really with the elementary or secondary school systems. Consider that probably more than half of the students in the English Montreal School Board are today in French immersion, which means that most of their learning day is spent in French. And for those anglo kids in English schools who are in the non-immersion stream, they still spend about one third of the day in French!

Note also that some 10% of anglo kids in Quebec who could go to the English schools (immersion or non-immersion) forego this option and simply go to regular French schools with the native francophones and most of the immigrant kids.

Which is to say that my “ball park buddies”, at least those who would be born and bred Montrealers, are a product of another era and an endangered species.

The rub, as Hamlet would say, is how many of my “ball park buddies” will be replaced by newcomers to Quebec (either from the ROC or from other countries) who will continue to “ride” on the bilingualism of other non-francophone Montrealers to remain unilingual.

This isn’t as much of a non-factor as people think, since much of the real population growth comes from newcomers, who generally arrive as adults and of course soon end up in the workplace where, if they can’t speak French, the language of work often ends up being English, often just to accommodate them. And so the cycle goes on and on, and Montreal is provided with a (seemingly) endlessly replenished supply of people who can’t speak French.

And when all those kids learning French in school in Montreal end up in the workplace as adults, they’ll be surprised at how (largely courtesy of these newcomers), resolutely English much of the Montreal job market still is, in spite of 30+ years of Bill 101.

I hear this all the time and used to think it myself but I have come to disagree with it. It is the classic rallying cry of (English-)Canadian nationalists à la Mel Hurtig who want this country’s francophones to band together with the anglophones and take on the American juggernaut.

The truth is that Brad Pitt has never barked back “I don’t speak French!” to a client who has dared to demand service in that language in a store in Quebec. Tom Cruise, to my knowledge, has never personally imposed English as a workplace language on majority francophone Québécois.

Sure, the Hollywood steamroller is an issue in Quebec just as it is elsewhere in most of the world. But that’s not the main issue here, and is far down the list behind the way Canada has been set up politically, institutionally and economically.

But the main issue here is in fact a local one. The prevalence of English in Montreal is mostly an Anglo-Montreal-generated phenomenon, and is addressed in this thread (where you will find my views on the topic on 10 Oct 08 at 9:00 am):

http://angryfrenchguy.com/2008/09/21/in-montreal-liberals-try-to-speak-french-and-the-bloc-wont-speak-english/

Comparisons between “Palestine” and “Quebec” may be inevitable. They’re also likely to be faulty, even feverish.

In the Palestinian territories religion dominates secularism. In Quebec it’s the opposite. In Israel, the more anterior claim to the land belongs to the Jews. In Quebec it’s the francophones. Etc. And each land is filled with complicated, individual stories that remain buried behind the headlines.

Well, I’d say the jury is still out on what will happen. This thread has had a lot of pessimism about French in Montreal, and I admit to contributing to it myself. As you accurately point out, Bill 101 (especially the schooling provisions) is having an effect and has nonetheless put French on a stronger footing than it has been in centuries.

If you look at this study, you will see that generally speaking the law is working quite well in most schools on Montreal Island:
http://im.metropolis.net/research-policy/research_content/partid/int_meth.pdf

An interesting finding is that French does pretty well in “United Nations” type schools, even those where native francophone Quebecois are virtually absent. The determining factors for the kids adopting English rather than French (in the minority of situations where this occurs) seem to be more:

1) an overwhelming anglo environment in the neighbourhood where the school is located

OR

2) the presence of large numbers of students of who were anglicized prior to entering the French school (think Italian and Greek Montrealers whose parents were born before Bill 101, or kids from countries like India or Pakistan).

Bottom line is that the future in Montreal is likely to be more francophones of various origins like Amir Khadir butting heads with the odd unilingual anglos that are still left in town.

That is, unless the balance is tipped by a continued migration of unilingual anglos to Montreal from the ROC and elsewhere, and if these newcomers continue to take advantage of the steadily increasing bilingualism of the francophone Quebecois (that has accompanied the meteoric rise of this group’s education levels since the 1960s) in order to opt out of learning French.

I think you might find this stuff interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Catalonia

http://www20.gencat.cat/docs/Llengcat/Documents/Publicacions/Publicacions%20en%20linea/Arxius/sl_situation_tables.pdf

All in all, the population of Catalonia is almost evenly split between Catalan and Spanish (Castellano) speakers (as opposed to the 85% share of French speakers in Quebec). In Catalonia, it depends on which measure you use (first language learned as a child vs. language most often used today). Most people agree that the realistic breakdown is a slight advantage to Catalan, say 55% to 45%. Castellano probably has a slight edge in Barcelona, whereas Catalan is slightly stronger outside the city.

Catalan is probably getting a boost (it is higher in current language of usage than as a first language) because Catalonia has a unified school system where part of the day is in Catalan and part of the day is in Castellano. There is no separate school system for Castellano speakers in Catalonia.

As you can see from the figures on the Wikipedia page, something like 95% of the population of Catalonia “understands” Catalan, but only 75% can speak it. The % of people who can write it is substantially less.

Canada measures this stuff differently, and asks people if they know a language enough to sustain a conversation. In the case of Quebec, by this measure something like 95% of the population can speak French. The figure for Montreal is somewhere around 90% if I recall.

So, as I said, French is in a more favourable situation in Quebec than Catalan is in Catalonia. One of the main reasons is the presence of a much larger number of native Castellano speakers in Catalonia, most of whom are internal migrants from other regions of Spain. Catalonia is the richest part of Spain. These migrants are referred to as “charnegos” in Catalonia, which is considered by many to be a derogatory term.

Now, since Quebec is a “middle-of-the-road” province economically in Canada, it’s not really much of a destination for anglo job-seekers from the ROC.

Imagine hundreds of thousands of Newfoundlanders, Manitobans and Ontarians moving to Quebec in search of work. That’s Catalonia in Spain.