Quote:
Originally Posted by saffronleaf
I think it's fair to separately distinguish visible minorities, but also worth noting the kind of linguistic diversity we're talking about in respect of Montreal.
Maybe this is similar to going to say, Brownsville, TX, which is... I don't know, I'm guessing, but 75% Hispanic but probably majority White. While it is majority White, there's something very different about Brownsville when compared to other similarly sized US towns in say, the Midwest. The non-Hispanic Whites and the Hispanic Whites interact, but at the same time appear to belong to different communities. And because of the linguistic and cultural differences, the place feels more diverse than its visible minority numbers would suggest.
Obviously... Montreal > Brownsville, lol, just trying to tease out that analogy.
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Well, that kind of diversity is pretty common in the "Old World". For example, all those linguistic minorities in Europe (eg. the Catalans, Scots etc.) or places in Africa and Asia where dialects and languages are really numerous even though North Americans might see all those language speakers as one "race".
On the other hand racial diversity without linguistic diversity is more common in the "New World", for example, having Afro-Brazilians, Brazilians of various European descent, even Japanese Brazilians who all speak Portuguese only, or assimilated Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans, African-Americans and white Americans who are monolingual English speakers. A lot of this is the result of forced assimilation of course (among native people in the Americas, the descendants of the Atlantic slave trade), one colonist group replacing or assimilating another (eg. Spanish replaced by English in former New Spain), plus giving up of heritage languages by voluntary immigrants in order to "fit in".