The Future of ‘Bilingualism’

Abstract

In the winter of 2006, I received a phone call from a journalist for the local outlet of the State-run French-language radio. She was working on a report on ‘the quality of the French spoken by francophone youth in Toronto’. She was concerned because, as a Québécoise who had been in Toronto for six years, she noticed that she had a hard time understanding local youth; that they used a lot of English; that they didn’t seem ‘proud’ to be francophone, the way she and her classmates in Quebec had been at their age. For her, a language is ‘like a muscle; if you don’t use it, it atrophies’. That is, each person starts out with one language; bilingualism can only take away from it. You end up ‘speaking neither language properly’, and this puts you at a disadvantage in job interviews, or when you want to talk to people from other places.