In French, please

The Office de la langue francaise (OLF) is launching a "sensitization campaign" to remind business owners in Montreal's downtown of the language laws requiring French to be the language first used in greeting customers, and to appear first, and twice as large as English, in any signage. The program is coming out of a recent survey designed to study how language is being used in the city's downtown core; the goal of the OLF (and the Quebec government) is to preserve the French character of the city. The survey revealed that French was the language of greeting 83% of the time, and the language in which customers were served about 90 per cent of the time (I'm surprised by that; it seems like less to me.) Apparently the survey was carried out because of a lot of complaints in the French media that too much English was being used in the city's business district. The OLF used 40 "francization counsellors" to conduct the survey; it employs seven other inspectors to enforce the language law.

Comments

[Christopher DeWolf]

From what I gather, when the study states that French is "the language in which customers were served about 90 per cent of the time," they are not referring to all customers --- they mean that francophone customers are served in French about 90 percent of the time.

In any case, I'm not sure how much those numbers really mean. The study included everything in the Ville-Marie borough from Fort Street in the west to Papineau Street in the east, which includes many distinct neighbourhoods, including some linguistic extremes. It doesn't make much sense to lump the Latin Quarter (extremely francophone) in with Chinatown (not francophone at all) and the downtown west end (extremely anglophone). The only thing these three areas have in common is that they are "downtown."

For the most part, the predominance of English in downtown Montreal is well-rooted in history. Even today, only about 1/3 of downtown residents are francophone, there are two large English universities totalling 60,000 students and most of the tourists who spend time in the area speak English.

For those reasons downtown Montreal has symbolic importance for nationalists. Personally, I have no problem with sensitizing downtown business owners to the importance of serving francophones in their own language, but I really resent it when lingustic extremists like Jean Dorion (head of the SSJB) imply that English simply should not be spoken downtown (as he did in an op-ed in La Presse last year, writing---and I paraphrase---that the west end of downtown is "too anglicized" and "that needs to change").

[Christopher DeWolf]

I should specify that when I state that only 1/3 of downtown residents are francophone, I am referring specifically to the municipal electoral district of Peter McGill, which includes the downtown west end, central business district, Chinatown and part of Old Montreal, but *not* anything west of St. Laurent.

[Christopher DeWolf]

And by west I mean east.

I should go to sleep.