Canada: You can't engineer language

Sat Dec 29 14:58:51 UTC 2007

Friday, December 28, 2007

You can't engineer language

National Post   Published: Friday, December 28, 2007

We reported it, but we have to admit it scarcely counts as news:
Canada will not reach the federal government's stated goal of having
half of its high school graduates capable of speaking both French and
English by the year 2013. So says Bernard Lord, the former New
Brunswick premier who is currently preparing a report on the state of
Canada's official languages. According to the latest figures from
Statistics Canada, which were released Dec. 4, the trend in
English-French bilingualism amongst Canadians aged 15-19 is actually
headed downward. In the 1996 census, the rate of bilingualism in the
age group was over 16%; in 2006 it was around 13%. For the population
generally, the rate of bilingualism among mother-tongue francophones
in Quebec is remaining static at around one-third. For anglophones
outside Quebec it grew very slightly in the 10-year period, moving
from 8.8% to 9.4%.

By these and other measures, Canadian bilingualism policy appears to
be consuming a great deal of money and providing little visible
progress. The francophone communities outside Quebec remain on life
support; their members use French with each other but generally feel
comfortable conducting trade and socializing in English. Anglos in
Quebec retain their embattled but entrenched status. Overwhelmingly,
Canada remains a land whose linguistic map is simple and sharply
divided. As a social engineering project, the effort to turn us all
into patriotic polyglots has failed. It will be left up to Mr. Lord
whether he wants to use this fact to plead for greater revenue
expenditures and effort, or whether it is time to pursue humbler
dreams.

Those who achieve fluency in a second language rarely regret it, and
in a bilingual state it is inevitable that there will be a bilingual
elite of some size in the ranks of government, the military and
business. But we see no shame, and great sense, in accepting Canada
the way it is and beginning to build policy on that basis. As a
country we can be proud of surviving (almost uniquely) as a bilingual
democracy, of building a federal civil service that works more or less
successfully in both languages everywhere and of making
second-language education available from sea to sea for those who wish
their children to have it.

Conventional measures of bilingualism, which focus on the ability to
hold a conversation in both languages, certainly underestimate the
value a child derives from merely becoming acquainted with the
rudiments of a second language. It is worthwhile to have schools that
open the door to French (outside Quebec) or English (within Quebec)
without forcing the student all the way through. The age curve
suggests that even fully bilingual high school graduates will lose
their second language anyway if they don't find a way to use it at
work or in daily life. We cannot hope to redraw the language map of
the country at will without an effort bordering on the totalitarian:
short of that, labour markets and other pressures causing population
shifts will go on spilling the ink hither and thither as they please.

 http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=201703

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