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  #41  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 4:06 PM
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I must say, I do like the idea of marginalized languages coming back and turning the tide against the forces of assimilation. It's a very romantic image, but I think in many cases rather impractical.
Briton and Cornish have come back a little bit from their nadirs against French and English, IIRC. Took a lot of effort, however.
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  #42  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 4:08 PM
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Who?
Acajack's favorite anti-French fan.
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  #43  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 4:08 PM
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Acajack's favorite anti-French fan.
Known by several other usernames as well, right?
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  #44  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 4:10 PM
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Known by several other usernames as well, right?
Too many to list.

I think he's on vacation.
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  #45  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 4:32 PM
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Briton and Cornish have come back a little bit from their nadirs against French and English, IIRC. Took a lot of effort, however.
Welsh, even moreso, is a bit of language preservation and revival success story.
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  #46  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 4:34 PM
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Thinking about it, perhaps the other example I can think of, besides Quebec is the case of English-speaking American Jews, and their descendants using Hebrew in Israel, depending on what you consider a "homegrown anglophone population".
It's a fascinating story but I am not sure I'd consider American Jews in Israel to be homegrown anglophones.
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  #47  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 4:42 PM
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Occasionally you hear claims that Anglos in American cities and states with lots of Hispanics, such as Miami, themselves voluntarily learn Spanish to function in said communities, but I am doubtful that it is the case that the majority of Anglos in Hispanic neighborhoods know Spanish well enough to talk to the locals on a regular basis at a natural, conversational level.

I don't think the average Anglo in these places has a level of fluency or education in Spanish much more than the average resident of Anglo-Canada does with their school-learned French, even if they did extended classes or French immersion in their youth, and then later lived and functioned in a fully Anglo society.

I think it's more like "I took Spanish in high school to fill a requirement" or "My Hispanic/Latino friends taught me the few basic words and phrases needed to talk to their grandma when I went over to their house" kind of thing, or "I hear Spanish spoken all the time on the street, in crowds and on the bus and they may outnumber English conversations there" when Americans sometimes overplay the idea of or talk about Spanish "dominance" regionally.

.
Yes, they do.

At this moment I am arguing with an American guy who says that Spanish is a bigger deal in Miami than French is in Montreal...
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  #48  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 4:51 PM
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Kerouac always considered his "French-Canadianness" an absolute core trait, his key identity-factor. But that was a long time ago.
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  #49  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 5:11 PM
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Yes, they do.

At this moment I am arguing with an American guy who says that Spanish is a bigger deal in Miami than French is in Montreal...
Seems obvious that you'll have more doors closed to you (banks, government, good jobs, etc.) if you're an unilingual hispanophone in Miami than if you're an unilingual francophone in Montreal. In Miami you also probably won't get justice 100% in your language if you're ever accused of something grave someday.

Huge difference between being the one official language of the place and being technically a foreign language, even if you have similar numbers of speakers.
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  #50  
Old Posted Oct 11, 2017, 5:22 PM
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Seems obvious that you'll have more doors closed to you (banks, government, good jobs, etc.) if you're an unilingual hispanophone in Miami than if you're an unilingual francophone in Montreal. In Miami you also probably won't get justice 100% in your language if you're ever accused of something grave someday.

Huge difference between being the one official language of the place and being technically a foreign language, even if you have similar numbers of speakers.
Pretty sure you can't work for Florida Power and Light (comparable to Hydro-Québec), or be a high school teacher or a bank teller in Miami if you don't speak English. There are tens of thousands of French only jobs of that nature in Montreal.
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  #51  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 12:52 AM
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It's a fascinating story but I am not sure I'd consider American Jews in Israel to be homegrown anglophones.
What are some examples of other groups considered to be homegrown anglophones, apart from Anglo-Quebecois?

Anglo-settler colonies where English dominated early on clearly experienced no challenge from any other language (eg. stereotypically Anglo-Canadians, Americans, Australians not of recent immigrant origin are famously reluctant to think second languages are important). British-ruled South Africa vaguely could resemble the situation with Canada, if you take Afrikaners to be analogous to French Canadians.

In many cases, more recent Anglophones living abroad are not homegrown, but expats (eg. Brits in Spain, Americans in Thailand) with no interest in assimilating to the local culture, so that doesn't count.

There's also descendants of English-speaking immigrants who assimilate to the language of the land where they arrive, like the American Jews in Israel I was mentioning or perhaps British-descent Latin Americans, such as the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was of partial English descent and whose father grew up speaking English at home.

I don't know though if any of these cases are similar enough to the Montreal situation.
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  #52  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 1:50 AM
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Pretty sure you can't work for Florida Power and Light (comparable to Hydro-Québec), or be a high school teacher or a bank teller in Miami if you don't speak English. There are tens of thousands of French only jobs of that nature in Montreal.
Incidentally, I happen to have to deal with FPL somewhat regularly and I'd say when on the phone I often get people whose first name betrays a Hispanic origin but they obviously all have flawless English. There's the Spanish option but I don't see why they'd hire unilingual hispanophones to take those lines when they can just as easily hire bilingual hispanophones.

Miami and Montreal are somewhat comparable in the sense that if you're unilingual, you're putting yourself at a relative disadvantage for employment given the abundance of bilingual people who might be competing with you for that job -- and in each city, both main languages are pretty useful.
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  #53  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 2:02 AM
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I've never spent any significant time in Miami outside of airport layovers, but I wonder if most locals there actually do walk over to strangers and start speaking to them in Spanish first, since as a tourist, a very obvious clue towards the relative balance between French and English is the way locals in Montreal speak to someone in French first, and then switch to English once they sense any sign of hesitation.
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  #54  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 2:04 AM
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Miami and Montreal are somewhat comparable in the sense that if you're unilingual, you're putting yourself at a relative disadvantage for employment given the abundance of bilingual people who might be competing with you for that job -- and in each city, both main languages are pretty useful.
Wait... is the analogy that Spanish in Miami is like French in Montreal, or that Spanish in Miami is like English in Montreal?
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  #55  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 3:14 AM
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Wait... is the analogy that Spanish in Miami is like French in Montreal, or that Spanish in Miami is like English in Montreal?
Now that I think about it I don't believe it's possible to make a direct equivalency.
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  #56  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 3:37 AM
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I've never spent any significant time in Miami outside of airport layovers, but I wonder if most locals there actually do walk over to strangers and start speaking to them in Spanish first, since as a tourist, a very obvious clue towards the relative balance between French and English is the way locals in Montreal speak to someone in French first, and then switch to English once they sense any sign of hesitation.
I've been there a few times. My experience is that most people address strangers in English. This is not to say I have never been addressed in Spanish. It happens. Then again, I don't look like a Latin American. I have a very generic European look. I could probably pass for a Spaniard but not a Cuban or a Mexican.

My wife on the other hand could definitely pass for a Latin American. I guess she might get addressed in Spanish more than I do. But it's still very predominantly in English that she gets spoken to - and this goes for all places in the US she's been to that have large Latino populations.
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  #57  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 4:07 AM
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I've been there a few times. My experience is that most people address strangers in English. This is not to say I have never been addressed in Spanish. It happens. Then again, I don't look like a Latin American. I have a very generic European look. I could probably pass for a Spaniard but not a Cuban or a Mexican.

My wife on the other hand could definitely pass for a Latin American. I guess she might get addressed in Spanish more than I do. But it's still very predominantly in English that she gets spoken to - and this goes for all places in the US she's been to that have large Latino populations.
As opposed to Montreal where people speak to strangers in French by default regardless of how you look.
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  #58  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 4:17 AM
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I've never spent any significant time in Miami outside of airport layovers, but I wonder if most locals there actually do walk over to strangers and start speaking to them in Spanish first, since as a tourist, a very obvious clue towards the relative balance between French and English is the way locals in Montreal speak to someone in French first, and then switch to English once they sense any sign of hesitation.
If you don't look Latino, you'll get addressed in English. Not comparable to Montreal where there's no relationship between visible ethnicity and mother tongue.
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  #59  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 4:25 AM
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Wait... is the analogy that Spanish in Miami is like French in Montreal, or that Spanish in Miami is like English in Montreal?
Doesn't matter; both cities share the somewhat rare characteristic of having two major languages, each of which useful, that's all I said.

However, you could make a case for both pairings in the analogy. You have the version where one language is the language of most locals, and the one that gets used when they speak to each other, while the other language is the language of most people who come from the rest of the country, and of the federal government (fully or mostly), and of nearly all tourists, and of science and commerce globally.

Then you have the other version, where one language is the historical language of the city, the language used by the city's administration, the language of the provincial/state government, and the dominant language in the rest of the province/state, while the other language is a more recent arrival to the metropolis, a language that's been displacing the first, at least locally, and that its progress should be "fought back" (or at least, a case could be made that it should).
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  #60  
Old Posted Oct 12, 2017, 3:47 PM
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Another thing is that neither in Miami nor anywhere in the U.S. do you really have non-Hispanics integrating and assimilating to the Hispanic population. No matter how large or dominant it is demographically.

In Miami you don't see African-Americans, Haitians, anglos or anyone else "becoming" Hispanics.

In fact the movement is in the other direction, with younger Hispanics becoming anglos, or at least becoming English dominant.

Even if you go to places like Laredo which are 95% Hispanic, an Indo-American kid will integrate into the broader American anglo culture and will only acquire those snippets of Hispanic culture that have become mainstream Americana.

This is quite different from Montreal/Quebec where a growing segment of the population is made of people of non-francophone origin but who live pretty much seamlessly as francophone Québécois.

It's been estimated that about 15% of the people who are categorized as "francophones" in Montreal aren't of francophone origins.

In Miami you don't really have anything like this: comedian Mariana Mazza. Born and raised in Montreal. Lebanese mother and Uruguyan father.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puoWFbseVU4

Not to mention the other two guys in the video. One of them is called Dave Morgan.
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