Quebec's french language police strike again - All Windows upgrades are french
 

This shit just never goes away.

My GF works for a large company in Montreal who deal with thousands of clients world wide. Her company laptop was given to their tech support for an upgrade and when she got it back she found it was now in french. Why? The Quebec Language police, the same assholes that force all signs to be french, the same who tried to get "Pasta" removed from Italian menus, are forcing companies to switch.

Pathetic.

you speak French?

What you mean with the pasta thing?

this is so absurd that i dont even have words for that

If I moved to Quebec and couldn't speak french would it be an issue?

How do they deal with customer services for example - If I phoned a bank would they answer in French?

The whole thing seems strange - most countries that have different languages end up with a 'winner' that becomes the default - Canada seems almost split into 2 countries....

there was a recent complaint in montreal that an italian restaurant didn't have french on it. Like people can't figure out what a insalata caprese is... haha

It's not the people, it's more of a political grand stand than anything.

tabernacle !

Hm that sounds pretty ridiculous. Political or not.

French is part of the history and culture of Quebec..

If you don't like your culture you can come here to Vancouver....where there is no culture.

You get similar in Barca with Catalan.. it´s stupid.

Never noticed once a requirement for Catalan here in BCN.

USA tout le chemin !

Sadly here in Canada when ever you call anywhere that has a automated response system we have to push 1 for English everything is french default. if we don't push 1 it will continue in french. Even though the percentage of Canadian's who do not speak is french is higher than those who do. I Am from Vancouver..... same shit there too.... Vancouver fell to shit right before the Olympics hit

Fucking racist bullshit.

I think it all makes perfect sense. If you want to preserve your heritage and culture, you have to resist everything that is changing or diluting that. Ukraine has done the same thing to try to reclaim their identity and disassociate themselves from the Soviet Union and that history and get back to who they were and preserve that. I wish all countries were like this. I wish the USA had a strong sense of a collective identity, who they were and who they wanted to be. Instead its just a huge mish mash of selfish assholes.

They are trying to defend their language, this has nothing to do with racism imho.

The attempt to stomp out every trace of other languages while insisting it is to protect French culture actually goes too far and is definitely racist.

Basically you have Quebec nationalists that are mad about losing to the English 400 years ago. Their goal is to erode all traces of English and enforce French via law.

The more the population is force fed rules and restrictions about having to use French they create more discourse, animosity and resistance.

As mentioned in a reply above, this is not about the people. This is a ploy by a separatist government to ignite old battles in the general population that only currently exist in the minds of the hardline Quebec nationalists.

Yes it would be an issue. Visitors can get away without it but there are enough unilingual francophones in Quebec that even if you could find a job as a unilingual anglophone just getting through the day would become a slog. Some of your coworkers may not speak english, retail workers, hospital staff, hot chicks etc.

Even in Montreal - because it is the biggest city a lot of unilingual francophones congregate there from all over Quebec and the world.

france want to rule!

This is as good a summation as I've seen.

Our town here in Niagara region is geographically split by the Welland Canal - the west side of town predominantly Anglophone while the east side is dominated by francophones (street signs in french/english).

The difference compared to Qweebek being - the francophones don't have anal separatist reps screaming to have their signs in french-only. They're happy to have them bilingual.

Sounds very much like a French thing to do.

I'm totally for Quebec preserving its french culture. The problem is that they do nothing to promote french, but everything they can to suppress English.

If you own an English book store about England that sells only to British tourists, you must:

- Have a french a french sign outside, and only french signs inside.

- Your answering service must answer in french first, with french being the default. Same is true for English schools.

- You must greet your customers in french.

The language cops are everywhere and they test for the above. If you get caught being english, you are fined.

Here's how Quebec could become cool :

- Make it law that all signs must be in french, with big fat french letters, no problem - just allow English n the sign too. Even in small letters, its fine.

- Same for menus. HAMBOUGOIS and CHIEN CHAUD in big letters, then ("Hamburgers and Hot Dogs" in small letters.

Why? It shows respect and thanks the English idiots like me who continue to live here and makes us feel a little more welcome in our home towns, and it is great for tourists who want to learn a little french while they're here. Right now I would feel very unwelcome here if I was visiting from the US.

honnestly people don't give a damn about the purity of the french language here.

Btw did you know that Kim Jong Il (the father of our beloved leader Kim Jong Un) invented the 햄버거 ?

http://www.redorbit.com/news/odditie...ed_hamburgers/

I'm a french lover but I speak english daily, and encourage everybody to do it too. I won't comment some crazy comments here above but, to do a long story short, if possible, is that I believe we need to protect the french language, the method the current politician party is using is just crazy, ********** defines it well!

My partner is english-speaking, and told stories about how stupd they are at school for example, barely forcing them to speak french @ home.

The bottom line is, Montreal is bilingual. So that you are french/english-speaking, you better know a bit of both languages. And if you don't, well what a big fucking deal...... We just need to live in a common sense manner that's all.

The person in charge of the language policy did retire of the job after that scandal. It was a bad decision from one person not from a whole province so no need to make it sound like the whole province hate on other language.

It should be noted that both the English and French media definitely fuel any fire they can related to linguistics in Quebec. A constant gnashing back and forth like an old couple arguing.

customer service answer in french first but can talk in english. If it a phone call you alway have the option to press 1 for french 2 for english for exemple.

Canada is english and have only Quebec that is french. Most the people in Montreal speak both language and sometime I see people that only speak english working in restaurant, commodity store, call center so yes it possible to come to Quebec without talking french.

Montréal is a world class city, people can speak any language they choose.

That makes way too much sense... so it will probably never happen :disgust

Wouldn't be such a stupid arguement, if either party could actually speak their language properly.

English = Not quite English.

French = Not quite French.

Get a grip, it is absolutely pathetic.

Worst thing is, the country that has the most success with multi-culturalism, also promotes outright fascism based on language. Pretty fucking stupid really.

Toilet paper.

Everyone with a brain knows it is just some dinosaurs bitching, fuck them. :boid

Lots of good people who don't want to argue about old people's battles. :thumbsup

No, not an issue at at all. I don't agree to the peoples that said yes....

In Montreal for sure no problem, half speak english primary and the other half mostly understand and speak English

Even in Quebec my town where everybody is French, its not really a concern, only the older people doesn't speak a lot english, but almost everybody under 40 can understand and speak basic english, and services place are use to that..

Only in small cities in region could be a lil problematic..

And for all the laws and the things about the french protection, but i think they have to do it to preserve the culture and the unique identity. Yes sometimes its too much and they take bad decision, but who doesn't, hard to draw the perfect line between protection and doing too much.... So i will take the too much before the not enough/non-action

Its a debate that been here for years, and will stay forever i guess, and hard to judge from far when you dont know all the situation.

Theres english all around Quebec Province, and more and more english inside the province so its ok to be pro active... that beiing said im against separation and im pretty happy in the Canada

Voila mon point de vue !

I'm all for language and heritage being preserved, but being a straight up nazi about it is pretty damn stupid. As far as I can tell, English Canadians even decided to come up with their own words for French ones that English people from England don't even know.

Broil for example: English/English French/French use Grill, but that is French? Pfff...We'll make our own word up Broil.

Courgette: French / English, but not Canadian "English" no, we'll use the Italian word Zucchini.

It's weird to me (and a bit stupid.) But, maybe I just don't understand. I'd love to see people from Newcastle or Liverpool trying to protect their Scouse or Geordie languages in their regions, would pretty interesting.

That is pure BS .... or an error by a lousy tech.

As a system Admin for a major FEDERAL company ( thousand of employees/users), we are migrating OS from XP ( yes, XP ) to Windows 7 ( 7 , not 8 ) and by default the OS is installed in english language, If requested, it will be installed in french.

As for the " pasta" issue, you will always find zealots or idiots in the workforce: that was one . Nobody in Quebec wants to remove such terms from menus ...

I am thinking of moving for work to Northern Italy ... I think I will need to speak italian as well... such a bummer ... french should be plenty...:2 cents:

FYI, that is exactly the law that is in place , word for word ...

As for US ( or other tourists ), they are greeted in Hotels, airports, taxis, etc ... in english . They can read english papers, listen to english radio stations and watch english TV stations ... pretty bad, hey ?

So its not the pasta thing rather just requirement for restaurants to have menu in local language (as well)?
Makes perfect sense.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

You mean nationalist. There is no race in French language vs Italian language or versus English language. Plus frenchies and english are of the same race.

So all those eateries (surely at least 99.9%) in the US or UK that don't provide English translations of well-known foreign words like pasta, or pizza, or burrito are behaving nonsensically?

:facepalm:

I live in Montreal and I don't speak French, it's not an issue. Downtown everyone speaks English so you'll always get around. They have to for tourism. I live in the west end, right between Westmount and NDG, a very english area. Move to the east and you're fucked yes, lol.

Are the French Canadians hotter?

about right

The really sad issue here, is that the OQLF has received $23 MILLION dollars in funding since 2006, but Montreal streets have potholes the size of small lakes .....

http://montrealracing.com/forums/sho...he-west-island

isn't there a lot more to a culture than just language? by pushing french so much in their province, they are isolating themselves economically. english is the language of business and if people don't have a good grasp of it, they are limited to doing business locally. not to mention there is english culture in quebec as well going back just as far as the french do. they just get shut out because they're the minority.

I used to think it was never a real issue either until i experienced what its like to go through the health care system being english and not knowing french.

my girlfriends mother needed to be hospitalized for a period of time due to a bad fall and she is english speaking, born and raised in the Hull area. she speaks some french but its limited and she's lost some of it as she's gotten older. anyways, trying to get nurses and even doctors to speak in english was difficult. i found they would often avoid speaking at any length due to their limited english, both nurses and doctors. nurses were the worst. they would speak french knowing that she doesn't understand it and even avoided her due to it. luckily my girlfriend speaks french so she could talk to them while she was there and get information that was not communicated in english to her mother. i would imagine she felt quite vulnerable in that situation and its not one i would want to be in either.