Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Another interesting question is why French survived much better than Gaelic in Nova Scotia during the 20th century.
I am too lazy to look things up but having worked with francophone minorities, Nova Scotia had off the top of my head about 50,000 francophones around 1900. So about half the number of Gaelic speakers in the province.
Today there are probably around 35,000 to 40,000 French speakers in the province. So there's been assimilation and decline for sure but nowhere near the scale as what happened with Gaelic.
So I wonder why that is, especially since Acadians in NS were also subjected to English only schools for a large part of the 20th century, had basically no government support for their language until the latter part of the 1900s, had almost no "new" francophones moving to their communities from Quebec, NB, France or elsewhere, and were effectively isolated from the mainstream francophone sphere of Canada (which explains the unique quirks in their speech that persist to this day).
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The Acadians that maintained their language and culture were likely segregated from mainstream Anglophone society, living and interacting primarily with each other.
That likely didn't happen with Gaelic. Presumably they lived among and interacted all the time with Anglophone Nova Scotians.
Our French and Irish speaking settlers, who dominated pockets of the province for generations, were nearly completely assimilated. The francophones lost the battle largely as a result of the American military base in Stephenville. The Irish speakers were just slowly absorbed into the general Irish heritage population. I believe our last census showed not a single person for whom Irish was their mother language - so it's effectively dead here except for the middle aged and older people who picked it up from older relatives, and all of the individual words that are still common in NL English (ie sleeveen) and our past tense structure ("what's after happening now?" Compared to the Canadian "what just happened?"; "I'm after buying one" versus "I bought one", "I'm after going" versus "I went", etc.). And in former francophone areas you still encounter people who can't speak a word of French but say things like "I already ate, me", "Throw grandfather down the stairs he's hat"