Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
This is all very good but perhaps you and others should read up on everything that was done to suppress French in most of Canada's provinces - including yours - from the late 1800s until the 1960s and 1970s.
It is indeed a positive thing that they have been attempting to make amends over the past 20 years or so but of course it is easier to do that now that any chance of French being co-equal with English has been effectively eliminated by decades of assimilation.
|
I didn't want to get back into it, but I feel I have to address this comment.
You're being very selective; it was done against every non-English language. As soon as the immigration flood gates opened in the late 1800s from Central and Eastern Europe, French was at a disadvantage here. In fact, by the time German and Ukrainian immigrants bowled over the French population in terms of the sheer numbers that came, French hadn't even really established itself as an important language. The numbers that came even to an extent overpowered British Isles ethnicities so much so that the English language was being threatened, not by French, but by German and Ukrainian (among some others). As such, the Government started to supress all other languages (French was an afterthought at this point, if it was even a target to begin with at that time), and as a result, Ukrainian and German all but died out of regular use unless you go talk to grandparents in rural areas. As a German and Ukrainian myself, this has deprived me from learning my mother tongues through my parents, but it's the past, move on already. I have put in effort to pick the languages back up a bit, but there is no going back and changing what was done, so accept it, and try to make changes now; perpetual martyrdom does nothing.
So in terms of languages here; German, Ukrainian, and certainly Cree have a stronger case than French in terms of discrimination and forced assimilation. French was not specifically discriminated against, it was overpowered by other immigrant languages, and it was discrimination against these even "less desireable" foreign languages that French felt an indirect effect of language policies; French itself was not the main target of language policies here; it was collateral damage. The importance of French here was always much further down on the totem pole, but that's because French is about 7th in terms of ethnic numbers, ranking behind German, English, Irish, Scottish, Ukrainian, and Natives. And as Saskatchewan stagnated for decades, this is basically the proportions that have been present over the last 80 or so years (with the possible exception that French might have been higher than Native).
If you wanted French to develop co-equally in Saskatchewan, it would have also been at the expense of German, Ukrainian, and Cree, and at that point, would the French have been any better than the English in causing "soft" or "hard" ethnocide (as that other study used the term)? But then I guess, these other historically important languages don't matter right?
Or were you not aware of the other language dynamics that were present historically in my province's history?
Prev
Linear Mode
