this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
105 points (97.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43897 readers
1088 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have a little bit of experience in this. Brazilian living in Quebec. So, my friends almost always spoke in Portuguese with their children, school and TV were in French. After some time, school starts also to teach English and they chose the language of the TV. Now the kids are almost always speaking in English, although the are fluent in Portuguese and, of course, French.
Now, my wife and I hated the TV in French, so we kept it in English. So, my kids had to deal with three languages from the start. They mixed everything up and we screwed up by saying words in all three languages. We speak mainly Portuguese but we would use words that they learned in other languages in those languages instead of in Portuguese. In the end, my kids mix all three languages in a single sentence, which is weird as hell. They’re slowly separating the languages and we too. Now, every sentence we speak is in a single language. Their friends help in a way, because they also speak French in class but English outside (and Quebec’s government hates that).
So, if both of you are Portuguese speakers, I’d only speak Portuguese with them and let the TV and school teach English. They’ll know how to keep things separated.
I'm not familiar with how the Quebec government works so that sentence made me curious. Why does the govt. hate that?
They try everything so people keep speaking in French. They force kids to go to French schools and reduced the places in English schools. They’ve had teachers and monitors forcing kids to speak in French even during recess. Of course it doesn’t work and kids will speak in whatever language they want, mainly English.
It's interesting to hear the steps taken to achieve their goals, but I was more curious about why those are their goals in the first place. Why does the govt. want to force a language on the people when they obviously prefer a different language?
Quebec was a French colony, they lost a big war, they hate the monarchy and dream of independence from Britain and the English part of Canada.
Fascinating bit of history, thanks!
Thank you for your insights! I’m not a native (Brazilian) Portuguese speaker but I’m fluent.