Montreal
The flight attendant on an Air Canada Vancouver-Montreal flight smiles and then says,
“Sorry, I don't speak french”
.
This sentence is a ritornello in English Canada.
French is available to subscribers absent from Newfoundland to Vancouver.
The figures from Statistics Canada are relentless.
Nationally, only 6.8% of English Canadians can conduct a conversation in the language of Molière.
In Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario, the most populous English-speaking provinces, less than 4% of residents speak French as their mother tongue.
Only Quebec and the Acadian province of New Brunswick still widely speak the founding language of the country.
"From coast to coast, including Montreal, French is in decline,"
wrote the leader of the official opposition, the Conservative Erin O'Toole, in a column published in mid-February in the Quebec daily
Le Right
.
Read also:
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