Should the Canadian federal government force Quebec to repeal its language laws?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Have to disagree that the laws were a "historical necessity" - there was never any chance of Québequois French dying out; the situation was and is quite different to the sometimes endangered minority languages of Western Europe as French is only a minority language in a wider Canadian context and Québequois society is quite clearly seperate (thanks to geography as much as anything else) from wider Canadian society. French is in fact the majority language and the idea that English being the language of the bourgeoisie and of commerce (an important fact in its own right, but lets come back to that later) constituted a threat to Québequois French is absurd. In fact French was in no real danger in the one part of the province (the isle of Montreal) where it was a minority language - residential segregation and the link between class and language put paid to that.

But that's the important part - the link between class and language, the fact that English was the language of trade and of the bourgeoisie. A situation in which the elite speaks a different language to the bulk of the population and uses the fact that it's a minority language to it's advantage is an explosive one. Again, I disagree that the backlash against English was a "historical necessity", but I do think it was inevitable (more or less).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I see that no one's interested in the pseudo-marxist-whatever look at the situation