Quote:
Originally Posted by jd3189
I could have done that, but I wanted to read what people here had to say about it.
I will say that I tried researching the reason why French isn’t as prominent as it once was in Louisiana and parts of the US that the French were present in ( like Missouri, Detroit, etc). Based on the responses so far, it seems that there has been a historical suppression of French everywhere on the continent.
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Perhaps a way to frame it is that British settlers in the British Empire (and their later descendants, Anglo-Americans and Anglo-Canadians) tried their damn hardest to assimilate/overpower away any pre-existing predominantly non-English speaking regions that they acquired. This included both indigenous languages as well as the languages of previous settlers (French, Dutch, Spanish)
In most cases, they succeeded (e.g. Dutch is no longer the lingua franca of New York state or the former areas of New Amsterdam, French no longer holds strong in Louisiana, Missouri, Detroit, and Texas, California etc. were turned into Anglophone places after the US acquired them from Mexico etc.).
However, the holdouts are the places where for one reason or another (political power, inconvenience, resistance), the English-speakers did not succeed in their project of new nation-building via language change, such as Quebec (obtained from New France but still French speaking) or Puerto Rico (obtained from Spanish Empire but still remained Spanish speaking).
So, it's notable that for instance Quebec but not Louisiana retained French or that Puerto Rico* but not Texas retained Spanish despite the power of Anglophone assimilation, because it provides an exception to the idea that English-speakers always won and could impose their will on others.
* I must admit I am more hazy about the details of the Puerto Rican case, but probably something also along the lines of critical mass or the difficulty of forcing everyone to learn to use English first over Spanish (as well as not being a state, it was less connected to and easily influenced by the mainland) made Puerto Rico hold out its unique identity whereas states like Louisiana, California, Texas could not keep themselves a state of non-English speakers in a sea of English speakers.