French Language Quotes
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
The 1977 Quebec language law decreed that all immigrants be educated in French, that all businesses transact in French, that English-named towns, rivers, and mountains be Frenchified, and that all English (or even bilingual) commercial signs be outlawed. Other minorities could only transact business in French. After great protest and ridicule the Quebec Parliament amended the law to allow French signs to contain another language provided that the font of the other language was no bigger than half that of the French.
