this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
43 points (93.9% liked)

Canada

7187 readers
402 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Universities


💵 Finance / Shopping


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

A group representing Quebec's English-speaking community is seeking an injunction with the court to challenge the province's controversial French-language law known as Bill 96, CTV News has learned.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

The only people I've ever heard scoff at the idea of culture and language being intertwined have been unilingual anglophones. Funny coincidence.

I'm actually dismayed at the comparison of language with tech standardisation. Sure, it's silly to pretend that learning English isn't economically or socially beneficial, no one is arguing against that. But you're essentially saying that the language I love in, I think in, I learn in, I exchange in, I live in is substandard because what, fewer people speak it?? Language is culture and culture can only live through language, it's normal for people to want to preserve that. Language is more to humans than a simple communication protocol.

A language is simply a means for two people to communicate ideas, and that is paramount to a functioning society. Without a common method to exchange ideas, you can't have a society.

You realize French is a language, used by people in Québec (and across Canada, there are a million francophones outside Québec) as the common method of exchanging ideas? Is Québec not a functioning society, or at least as functional as anglophone-majority provinces?

[...]anyone in the tech industry knows the problems that come with having multiple, competing, interoperable standards.

Just curious, if Mandarin suddenly became the new lingua franca overnight, and your province's Mandarin-speaking population was growing constantly, would you just throw English away and learn Mandarin?

[–] baconisaveg@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 months ago

Just curious, if Mandarin suddenly became the new lingua franca overnight, and your province’s Mandarin-speaking population was growing constantly, would you just throw English away and learn Mandarin?

Over several generations? Absolutely.

[–] systemglitch@lemmy.world -5 points 9 months ago

"culture can only live through language"

Lo-fucking-l.

That was a great example of ignorance in a nutshell. There is nothing wrong with loving your language, but calling it the only way your culture can live is simply wrong.