Yeah honestly, there’s no replacement for textbooks, paper and pencil when it comes to learning a new language

Bill C-2, a border bill, failed. It had two sections 14 and 15 that basically gave the cops permission to demand any data from any company in the country about any customer. This included lawyers and doctors.

I remember hearing about this bill. I’m glad to hear that it failed

Or Klingon

Now that’s the spirit. Thank you. After so many negative comments, reading this was like drinking a nice cold glass of water. I am 100% in favour of francophone Aussies

je ne comprends pas

Right. That’s just an implication of the fact that (1) French is very widely spoken in Africa, and (2) the demographic weight of Africa will be increasing throughout this century by a lot (for example look at this graph if you want to see the relative proportions). Its population is shooting up while the population of everywhere else is projected to shoot right down. So even if French doesn’t fully replace English it’s undeniable that its global usage will grow substantially

Edit: here’s another link for you to check out if you’re still don’t believe that French is, indeed, the fasted growing language right now.

The TL;DR:

A study by investment bank Natixis even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin.

Well I’ll have whatever they’re having

US population isn’t even a lot lol.

It is the third most populous country in the world, iirc, but I take your point

I don’t think France can really even do any imperialism these days…

France can’t. But the French Canadians? There might be untapped potential there

But the population of China will start to decrease soon if it isn’t already, whereas the population of Africa is booming and will continue to boom for quite some time. And Mandarin is pretty localized to China, without much currency outside the country. In contrast French is an international language used around the world

Edit: or maybe I’m misreading your comment and that was already your point

Yeah but then we also have to compete with American media, which is a massive market, literally the biggest media market in human history. I don’t have high hopes

Your reasoning isn’t Quebec influences culture, but Quebec influences culture in Quebec.

Their local culture is home-grown, not imported. That’s what I’m aiming for. I don’t care about soft power projections, I would just think it would be better if Canada had a more homegrown, sovereign culture, rather than importing a lot of our culture from the US.

Well, we’ll see. China’s economy developed rapidly. It’s not out of the question that the same process could take place in some parts of Africa. Then there’d be a strong economic incentive to learn French.

African French (French: français africain) is the umbrella grouping of varieties of the French language spoken throughout Francophone Africa. Used mainly as a secondary language or lingua franca, it is spoken by an estimated 167 million people across 34 countries and territories,[Note 1] some of which are not Francophone, but merely members or observers of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Of these, 18 sovereign states recognize it as an official de jure language, though it is not the native tongue of the majority.[2] . . . African French speakers represent 47% of the Francophonie, making Africa the continent with the most French speakers in the world.[3][4]

From Wikipedia.

With the highest rate of population growth, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. . . . During this period, the populations of 28 African countries are projected to more than double, and by 2100, ten African countries are projected to have increased by at least a factor of five: Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia.

From the UN projections on population growth

Soft power is nice, but in this post I am more concerned with squishy power, i.e. the power to have sovereignty over your own culture, even if your culture isn’t exported outward

Poutine is from Quebec. The best hockey team in the NHL is from Quebec. Also in Quebec they consume far more media produced locally. Manitoba is the only province in Canada that was founded in an act of rebellion, in large part because Louis Riel didn’t want the British to take away the French language rights (and that’s a big part of the history of that province, and French is still widely spoken in Manitoba such as in St Boniface and some town whose name I can’t remember). Etc.

Might be tricky but King Charles seems like a polite fella who doesn’t want any trouble so I don’t think he’d make a big fuss about it if we changed the laws around

“Hey, you know that language that is one of the most commonly spoken internationally?

French is projected to be the most common language internationally by the end of the century, due to population growth in Africa and the stagnation of population growth basically everywhere else. If Africa’s economic development goes well that might also translate to more job opportunities, but that’s a lot harder to predict.

It would have to be implemented slowly, and start with the school system, to prevent this kind of thing. There have been successful language elimination campaigns before, even in our own country. Usually it’s done to promote English, and it’s done as an act of cultural genocide, but still. It’s possible.

Like I said in the post I’d also be in favour of reintroducing some Indigenous languages if that means stamping out English. If we are going to carry out a language elimination campaign it might be more fair that way. A reverse uno of sorts.

Now is the time for peertube to shine

Thats funny because here in Canada I knew a guy in highschool who had a clearly fake girlfriend who he said lived down south in the US