h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing me go on about my neighbourhood, but . . . .


Yesterday afternoon was the annual Grey Cup game (for non-Canadians who might happen by, the Grey Cup is the trophy awarded each year for the championship of the professional Canadian Football League [Canadian Football is a version of the sport only played in Canada]), and, as he does every year, one of my neighbours had a little get-together at which hardly anyone watched the game. Present were a number of members of the extended family of the hosts, three neighbouring families, and the assorted children associated with them all. Many children disappeared to watch a movie while fans of food and football stayed near the game broadcast and the kitchen.

The game was played here in Edmonton, but Edmonton's team didn't make it to the final, so, there was much merriment as each point was scored, no matter which team scored it. And, since hardly anyone had much of anything invested in the game, most spent their time in conversation about all sorts of subjects other than sport.

Something which struck me by the end of the evening is that, in that group made up of members of just four Canadian families, neighbours, I was an active participant in or quiet listener to, conversations in English, French, Cantonese, Ukrainian, and Russian.


Why would anyone not want to live in a place like this?

>I was an active participant in or quiet listener to, conversations in English, French, Cantonese, Ukrainian, and Russian. <

If a similar event was held here I'd be none to happy to find people at a mixed social event choosing to speak to one another in their mother tongue. If there was a specific event for eg Cantonese speaking people that'd be another matter of course. But from what you describe this is a get together of Canadian citizens from various ethnic backgrounds and original nationalities.

I think if you make a decision to make a certain country your home, or are welcomed to live there for reasons of asylum, you should expect to speak the lingua franca of that country at a mixed social event. (I understand that in Canada, French is also a lingua franca..but I doubt Ukranian is).

Yes it's nice to hear the sound of other languages..I'm especially fond of the sound of Russian. I know a few very basic bits of Russian, having visited the place on 3 occasions..and a fairly pathetic amount of French, given that we were taught it at school..but really its the principle I'm on about.

I think it would be quite rude actually to attend such an event, and speak your own mother tongue, because that would mean lots of people would feel excluded from joining in with the conversation. You'd just have lots of little groups or speaking to each other. As I say I think that's fine at home, or in a specific cultural event for just that group, but not a mixed event.

I see your point and agree with it to a certain extent, Effers. Perhaps I should have been more detailed. Reading over my initial post I notice that I wrote 'conversations in' where I thought I had written 'conversations involving'.

The principal conversations were in French (the language of the household) and in English. There were other, brief conversations in mixed English/Ukrainian/Russian and mixed English/Cantonese. Only the French and English conversations shut out mono-lingualists.

That having been said, I don't have a problem with people using their native language in mixed social contexts. I've certainly not seen a huge problem of new Canadians not learning English or French -- they use their second (or third) language very well, in my experience. But, to use a slightly different example, when I go into the local Latin American grocery store, the proprietor speaks English to me, Spanish to the customer next to me, and the customer next to me speaks English to me. When I go to the local Indian grocery it is the same, with Punjabi replacing Spanish. And the same for the Italian shop or the German grocery. I find it adds richness to the neighbourhood and is in no way rude.

Similarly, when the three relatives of the hostess the other night were sitting around the kitchen table quietly gossiping about their family, I certainly didn't think it was rude than they were speaking French. Nor would I have thought so if they had been speaking Cantonese.



'I understand that in Canada, French is also a lingua franca..but I doubt Ukranian is'

For the record, the local school system offers programmes in Arabic, American Sign Language , Mandarin, German, Hebrew, Spanish and Ukrainian. Oh, and English, too.

It seems we have a number of linguae francae.

Oh, I was just looking at the Edmonton Public Schools web page and thought I should clarify: those language programmes I mentioned aren't 'learn a second language' programmes. The languages children can learn as a second language in our schools are: Arabic, ASL, Chinese, Cree, French, German, Japanese, Punjabi, Spanish, and Ukrainian. And all children are required to take six years of instruction in a second language of their choice.

I'm a bit confused by what you mean by by what you are saying in terms of language teaching in schools. When I say 'Lingua Franca' I mean the language that 99% of the population speak.

Of course unless I was actually at that social event you spoke about, I couldn't really judge as to whether I thought too much conversation was going on in languages I couldn't posibly understand..and so felt excluded and irritated..or whether it was just very informally now and then.

But I'll be honest and say it might irritate/annoy me more than you even though I like it as well to some extent. I find social gatherings quite difficult sometimes, eg lots of family stuff, and feel a bit of an outsider..especially not having any children..so that would just make it worse for me when I'm wanting intellectual conversation.

I think shops are a bit different because they are really a designated social setting..though of course they can be that too. My local Turkish Cypriot shop is quite a social hub in many ways..and sometimes the extended family who run it will speak Turkish to each other briefly.

No I'm not rigid about it..but I think it maybe works better here that people speak English to one another as much as possible to break down barriers, because we do also have a lot of racial/cultural tensions between groups, that maybe you don't have for some reason.

'I'm a bit confused by what you mean by by what you are saying in terms of language teaching in schools. When I say 'Lingua Franca' I mean the language that 99% of the population speak.'

There are three publicly funded school systems in Alberta: the 'Public' system, the 'Catholic' system (this goes back to constitutional provisions from previous centuries) and a Francophone system. The curriculum is set by the Provincial Government, although the regional school boards have a certain degree of freedom. For the sake of my above post I was referring only to the Public system in Edmonton -- the Catholic system has it's own roughly similar set of linguistic options.

The Edmonton Public board requires that all students study a second language (choice of ten languages) for six years of the time they are in school. As well, the board offers bilingual programs in which much of the instruction in all subjects is conducted in a language (seven choices) other than English.

The Francophone system is simply a French language school system in which English is one of the available second language options.

I went to the Public system. My brother's kids went to the Catholic system. The children of the family which hosted the party go to the Francophone system.

Some provinces in Canada don't have parallel school systems. Some do. I've not seen that it makes much of a difference either way.

As for 'the language that 99% of the population speak' . . .

Canada is officially bilingual in English and French. The province of New Brunswick is officially bilingual in English and French. The territory of Nunavut is officially trilingual in English, French and Inuktitut. The rest of the provinces and territories are officially English speaking, but that just means you don't *have* to know another language to get a government job.

All that having been said, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a province besides Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia where 99% of the population shared a mother tongue. You can't even do that on my street!

Certainly, in the larger community pretty much everybody uses English daily, but just across the ravine from me in the neighbourhood around the French campus of the University, pretty much everybody uses French everyday unless an Anglo happens by. And so on throughout the city and the country.

There's a joke told about life in Quebec which actually applies across the country:

If you speak three languages, you're trilingual.
If you speak two languages, you're bilingual.
If you speak one language, you're English.





And, statistics on the languages Canadians speak 'in the home'

English 67%
French 21.5%


and, 20% of Canadians have a language other than English or French as their mother tongue.

If you look at the wiki thingy, we've got a lot of languages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada

'we do also have a lot of racial/cultural tensions between groups, that maybe you don't have for some reason'

I should have worked this into the last post.

I'm a firm believer that the reason we don't have the same degree of tensions is that we're all minorities here. That 67% English thing is deceptive, as is the 21.5% French. The largest minority we have here is the Quebecois. Franco-Albertans like my neighbours are adamant that they are something different from the Quebecois, and the Acadians are something different again and then their are the Haitian-Canadians. The 'English' are Scots, Irish, English, Icelandic, Ukrainian, Lebanese, Somali, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Philippino, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Iroquois, Cree, Haida and just the plain old white people whose families have been here so long they don't know where they've come from.

Canadian writer Gwynne Dyer some years ago wrote what I think was a very insightful piece on this issue and I've just managed to come across a pdf version of it: http://www.markville.ss.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/history/society/cotey/Visiblemajorities.pdf

When I say the language that 99% speak, that's shared, I'm not tallking mother tongue, though it can be of course. Certainly in my own street some people are first generation immigrants from various places, but they all seem to speak English as well as their various mother tongues. But many people are second or third generation Afro Carribean, they sometimes speak the patois with each other..though that's less now as more intermarriage occurs. But then some patois is now part of everyone's English.

I suppose a lot of differences between Canada and UK are to do with history. Certainly our school system is totally English based and foreign languages are taught to a degree eg French, but really that's quite a small thing. People with non English mother tongues, regularly speak it with one another, but that's entirely to do with it being something they desire and want themselves..not because the state teaches it. Though I don't know what goes on in things like Muslim faith schools..or even what might happen in the future as the government tries to take schools out of state hands to a degree and encourages parents to organise things. But I don't like the sound of much of what this government is trying to do ideologically with education..but that's another story..

But as I said we have plenty of tensions here between groups eg some of the recent arrivals from Eastern Europe are pretty prejudiced against black people. Also the bornagain black churches are pretty anti Muslim. In fact we have lots of problems But then I think that can be quite dynamic culturally in terms of all kinds of creative expression. That's one of the things I love about London,

I do think it works here that in our very crowded inner cities, that English is something to unify people, not like a melting pot thing, by all means people should keep their own languages if they wish, and customs and traditions, provided they don't hurt others, but there's this one thing that binds us together.

And of course English is a wonderful language for accepting new words and idioms. You'll hear such varieties of 'English' in different settings that has been influenced by people coming here...though of course much of that now has to do with tv. But I do love the way English evolves.

simpost

yes, pretty much everybody here *can* speak English. But nobody objects to people speaking other languages or putting up signs on shops in other languages (unlike how it was in the '70s when reactionaries bellyached about French being 'shoved down their throats'. Packaging is required by law to be bilingual (French and English) but due to various trade agreements with parts of the Americas it is now common to see trilingual packaging (French, English, Spanish) and nobody bats an eye at it. It's sort of like some of the EU products I've seen that have labels in about fourteen languages.

In Quebec, however, there are very strict laws about what can be on signs apart from French, right down to the size of the font allowed for the non-French parts. But Quebec is a distinct society . . . .

I've been thinking over what you've posted here..(yes really I do listen ). It's so hard for each of us to really convey how it feels to live where we do..crikey even I having lived in this area for the last 20 years, am still trying to work it out. And yes its always changing and evolving, as well as staying the same.

I get the impression that things are much more of a 'mosaic' in Canada. You have a vast vast country of different states that have quite a lot of autonomy I'm realising. Actually we're getting that a bit more of that here with devolution..but it's a bit different because England is still so much the dominant party, and I'm not sure how things will pan out with that. Honestly I have mixed views about it.

But yes for you, the more fundamental mosaic thing makes sense; you don't have all that weight of history, and unlike the US, another young country, not exactly a huge powerful, aggresive identity in the modern world.

Canada seems like a good experiment to me, from what you explain.

Here it's a bit like we've just moved the British Empire back to Britain, so there's a much more fundamental centrist thing holding it together. But still we are confident enough to give some power and identity to the parts; it's not a melting pot thing.

Anyway I'm waffling on a bit..and speculating like mad. But it is interesting to look at the different ways multi culturalism can work in different nations. And I'm pleased that if a British PM had come out with the stuff Merkle did recently..there'd be an absolute outcry..in fact it just *wouldn't be said* by a *PM*, that's just not cricket

a 'mosaic' is the way Canada has been described since I was a child and I certainly think it is an accurate metaphor.

About Ms. Merkle's comments: as I understood it her words were very inaccurately reported. I didn't think she said simply that multiculturalism wasn't working in Germany: I thought she said that Germans weren't working hard enough to make multiculturalism work.

Well I don't know the full speech, but I do know how the press played it here in western Europe..and you'd have to be a half witted m*ron of a politician not to know that a line like,

'"This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed," Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, west of Berlin, yesterday.

from,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/17/angela-merkel-german-multiculturalism-failed

wouldn't play to the right wing and the many soft racists in Western Europe at the moment. Are you not aware anhaga of the situation at present in the western EU. Sarkozy expelling Roma, the rise of the extreme right in places like Holland and even Sweden. And they've always been fairly strong in France.

Politicians know exactly what they are saying. And in the context here, it's disgusting IMO for the leader of possibly the strongest country at present in the EU to come out with that stuff. I mean crikey she knows full well about the extremists in Germany who are forever stirring up hate over the large Turkish population.

You can't just look at these things in a nice theoretical way. Canada is like the planet Mars compared to the context here..you only have to look at the bloody history of western Europe for thousands of years to know you choose your words very carefully indeed..you can't just be theoretical about things..like oh she was misreported. A voracious press here will sieze on this kind of thing, and politicians know this very well.

And I'm damn pleased that the extreme right here are still so essentially impotent and laughable..but that might well change, because there is most certainly a huge reservoir of hate just below the surface. That one sentence of hers is what people remember.

Look I know you're in Canada and its a million miles away..but surely you have some idea how different the situation is in somewhere like old Europe?

Sorry I haven't replied sooner. I'd missed that there had been a reply to my last post.

Certainly I am aware of the multitude of situations there which are wet dreams for the extreme right. It's just that Merkle's comments were reported in the right wing U.S. press in a very superficial way, purposely using it as anti-multiculturalism propaganda on this side of the ocean.

My heart sank when I read the reports of her speech. It was a stupid thing to say in any context, but in the European context (and speaking in German, of all languages to use) it was unconscionable.

Earlier I was just meaning to mention that she did say, without giving it anything like the emphasis that it deserved, that multiculturalism was failing due to lack of effort. Of course, that got well and truly buried under the 'total failure' stuff.

Sadly, I have little confidence that what seems to be the success Canada is enjoying with building a multicultural society could be repeated anywhere. We are the beneficiaries of a really big accident of history and a little bit of good management. Even the greatest management isn't going to make up for the lack of that fortunate historical accident.

About something you said earlier: 'You have a vast vast country of different states that have quite a lot of autonomy I'm realising'

This is true (of course, we don't like to call them 'states'). Our Provinces do not have the same degree of autonomy as U.S. states, or perhaps I should say, the division of powers between the levels is different between levels of government in the two countries. The U.S. was constituted with an emphasis on each State having as much power as possible while the Federal government should only have necessary powers. Canada was made sort of the other way about.

But your mention of 'states' reminded me of something I think too often forgotten by thoughtful people in the U.S. and Canada:

In eighteenth century North America there were a number of European colonies:

Upper Canada
Lower Canada
Nova Scotia
New Brunswick
Prince Edward Island
Newfoundland
California
Texas
Florida

and those thirteen ones in New England.

Nowadays, most people only remember the 13 Colonies who Declared Independence from Britain and sadly forget that the 5 Colonies which said 'No, thank you' to Independence and the Spanish (and later French) Colonies which weren't asked if they'd like to join the party.

The five colonies which said no thanks and later became Canada said 'no' because their leaders did not feel uncomfortable under British rule and because they did not object to the Crowns proclamation that Quebec, and by implication, any colony, was allowed to be a little different, to be, in modern Canadian terms, a distinct society. The 13 colonies objected specifically to that provision of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and made that objection clear when they decided to try to create 'a more perfect union'. The Five Colonies said to the Thirteen Colonies 'We don't want a more perfect union, we don't want to be given Liberty or Death. We want to get along with each other and to get on with our lives. We want peace, order, and good government, thanks.' And the Thirteen Colonies didn't really get it until the Five Colonies repeated their 'no thanks' by force of arms in the invasion of 1812.

Sorry for the ramble. My point is that the U.S. was founded on a rejection of multiculturalism while Canada is made up of the colonies which were okay with the multicultural document which was the principal trigger of the revolt of the Thirteen Colonies.



I should go get some real world stuff done.

yeah that's interesting what you explain about how things panned out in North America. It's often pointed out that in general the British attitude to Empire was more that colonies should have a degree of self identity and autonomy, where as the French approach was to consider colonies to be part of France. I certainly experienced that during my couple of months in French Guiana..eg imported French golden delicious apples were cheaper to buy in the market than locally grown tropical fruits okay a tiny example, but its still a 'departement' of France today.

I'm not trying to pretend that everything about our Empire was great..far from it..but there was a subtle difference in attitude, and in fact most colonies did gain independance peacably..(with notable exceptions I know, eg India and Kenya)

And like I say it's a bit like Britain is now a mini British Empire. And I'm hopeful that our way of doing multi culturalism will work here. We are nothing if not adaptive pragmatists. I mean we are happy to give our football English Premiership over to the very best foreign players, managers and now owners..just like we imported Holbein and Handel when there wasn't any decent Brits up to the mark..and we even imported our Royals from Germany

Yeah but I'm hopeful things will work here, despite problems. Since Cromwell, extremism is something to be avoided at all costs, because it frightens the horses...

I expect part of the reason that the Empire came to have that attitude (letting the colonies have some autonomy) was the bloody nose the Americans gave it. And, I'm sure that Canada benefited from what the Americans did. But there is little about U.S. political history or the U.S. political system which I find attractive, which is why I find the clear desire to move more and more toward U.S. style politics on the part of our current P.M. so objectionable.