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Montréal would not be a “bilingual” city, it would be an unilingual English city, like it used to be for 35 years in the XIXth century. French would be a language of translation, and the translation would get worse and worse as in the end, they would not even bother and use Babel Fish instead of even hiring actual translators.It would still be second-class to Toronto because the process of moving economical activities to Toronto started quite soon actually, and was structural. Nothing would have prevented it. People looking at statistics could have anticipated it as soon as 1913.99.9% of immigrants would send their children to English schools (remember the previous language law of Bourassa allowed for free choice). In these schools, French would be an optional class and most would not bother to take it. It’s already hard enough with language laws, imagine without!Anglos and allos in Montréal would not get bilingual. They would be unilingual in English. They would never do a single effort to be accommodating without being forced to.There would be a category of assimilated francophones that would expect to have the same social participation as actual French-speakers. They would DEMAND that every francophone institution be available in English so they can be part of them, and then force everybody to talk to them in English all the time, while not making their duty of learning French. They would be an anglicizing presence. [This actually happened in New England.]Montréal would be a much more boring city, being way less unique from other North American cities. It would be like la Nouvelle-Orléans : it would have some French heritage, but no organic French-speaking presence anymore but a few French-speaking immigrants that would be quite unrelated to the local French colonial history. Actual French-speakers would not live there and in fact would avoid the city. One does not go to la Nouvelle-Orléans to meet Cadien people to speak with.They would speak a sort of chiac in Laval and Longueuil.Every single job offer at all, excepted maybe the job of janitor and even then I’m not sure, would require proficiency in English even in Trois-Pistoles and Sept-Îles.French schools would require a rule to forbid the use of English in the classrooms or in the school’s playground, because if left alone the children would speak in that language all the time. They would have contempt for their own culture, find it folklorical, and lose proficiency in French as soon as they would graduate from their English-speaking high school. The French schools in general would be the object of contempt and ridicule and nobody would want to go there, not even the private ones. An English university would open in Trois-Rivières but all of the students would actually be local francophones. French speakers would be ashamed of being born French and just wish to their children to never even be aware of where they are from, in order to not feel the shame.The French-language activists would radicalize, they would have their journal called La Sentinelle. [La Sentinelle was the journal of the last resistants in New England. After bitter struggles against the Irish episcopate, they ended up giving up. The Francos were too assimilated to be saved.] Maybe some activists would put bombs. Language politics would be much more violent. Demonstrations would look like when the alt-right and the antifa meet each other: they would end up in riots.You would read articles like those:Le suicide de l’Ontario françaisAppel à la mobilisation!600 000 raisons de se poser des questionsFaudrait s’en parler…Mon assimilation, mon exil – Céleste GodinThis last one in English is especially interesting:http://tagueule.ca/2012/04/02/a-letter-to-my-franglo-ontarian-friends/A letter to my franglo-ontarian friendsTo my English-speaking French friends,Your names are Paquette, Lafleur, Lalonde, Belanger, Tremblay, Gauthier, Veilleux, Lemieux, Giroux. It might be hard to pronounce, or you might just pronounce it in English. Some of you may have two francophone parents, some of you only one, and some of you have never heard your parents utter a single word of French, despite their names being something like Jean-Pierre or Jacqueline.You may have graduated from a French high school, you may have switched over to immersion, or you may have gone to an English school. Hell, you may even have a French college degree.You may or may not know me, but you certainly know someone like me, probably with an accent aigu in their names, who actually spoke French in high school, brought French movies to watch in primary school, and likely tried to recruit you to go to some activity/concert/whatever in French, very often at the risk of social ridicule.Some of you may have cousins like me, whom you make an extra effort to speak French to at Christmas. You may have had a childhood friend like me, who learned English from watching Power Rangers with you. You may even have dated people like me, only to feel awkward when meeting your in-laws and being forced to admit you can’t speak French very well.I’m writing to you today as a well adjusted young man, an active member of the francophone community in Ontario. Since finishing high school, I’ve been involved with a variety of francophone organisations in the Sudbury area, and I’ve been trying, through various means, to find a way to make speaking French more normal for francophones in Ontario.I spent 3 and a half years studying in Montreal, where – despite what alarmist politicians and die-hard hockey fans would have you believe – bilingualism is a normal, accepted, (controversial, still) every-day thing. I returned to Northern Ontario about two months ago, and got right back into my francophone involvement. I participated in the launch of this site, and my job as a college recruiter allowed me to travel throughout the North, speaking with francophone students about pursuing their education in French.I say all of this because I want to ask you a question.It’s a question that has been bothering me since I was little, since I understood that speaking French in the schoolyard was not the best way to make friends. I’ve wanted to ask you this question every time I hear things like “I’m French but I hate speaking it” or “French music sucks”. I’ve wanted to ask you even more since I found out that some anglophones in Montreal have more respect for the French language than many “francophones” from my hometown.My question is this: do you even care? Do you even want to keep speaking French? Do you want people to fight for the right to have francophone nurses and doctors? Do you want people to keep taking significant financial risks by bringing francophone artists over here? Do you want us to complain about the signage in a Caisse Populaire being in English?Of course, faced with these kinds of questions, many of you will say that you understand the importance of the French language, that you wish you spoke it more, and that you will send your children to French school, so they won’t lose the French and so they can speak to their grandparents.So what’s the problem?I want to know if you care that French schools are filled with kids who don’t really care about French. I want to know if you actually watch French TV, or press 2 for French service. I want to know if, when you go to Montreal for Spring Break or Osheaga or UFC, you speak French to your servers at the restaurant. Quite honestly, I didn’t always use French during my years in Montreal, nor do I today in Sudbury. But I do speak it regularly, in multiple contexts, and most importantly, I can appreciate the influence bilingualism has had on my identity.I want to know if it is worth it for me and my like-minded friends to keep defending the place of French in this province, and in this country. I want to know if you’re behind us, or if you simply don’t care and are happy to get by in English without having to use French. An honest answer would, at the very least, be a weight off my back.As francophone Ontarians, we have a double burden. Not only do we have to justify our use of the French language to our Ontarian landlords, but we have to justify our outlying presence to our Quebecker cousins, who quite often can’t take us seriously, despite being genuinely surprised and happy when they actually do meet someone from Ontario who speaks decent French. We are straddling Canada’s traditional two solitudes, and if anyone can help anglophones and francophones understand each other, it is us.Let me be clear: I’m not blaming anyone. French is hard as fuck to learn when you have no reason to do so. Even the upper echelons of francophone decision-makers are at a loss for meaning, for purpose, and for solutions to our accelerating assimilation rates. I just want to know what you, my English-speaking Franco-Ontarian friends, think of this mess of an officially bilingual country we ended up in. I want to know if it’s still worth fighting for.Céleste Godin (translated by me, English in italics):Mon assimilation, mon exil – Céleste GodinThe issue with words is that sometimes, they stay asleep. It is the result of a long-term rest. By dint of living in an English town, of consuming American culture in English, and even speaking English to my housemates without realizing it, I have words that are becoming shy. There is a plethora of words that are strangely exotic to me. Not because they are complicated or chic vocabulary words. They are exotic to me because it’s been years I did not hear them. To hear them, again, whatever the context, makes me repeat the word loudly and with brio, as if they just were invented. I keep the best ones in my calepin (CALEPIN!), so I won’t lose them too quickly: Catéchèse. Débile. Gigoter. Fauve. The words I would spontaneously use instead would be in English (“notebook”), or a mix of simpler and less accurate French words (« les petits cours plates que t’es forcée à prendre avant la messe »). […]People tend to not believe me when I tell them I came close to lose my French. When we are perceived as a poster child/black sheep of the francophone/Acadian cause, people don’t believe one could lose one’s French. But assimilation is not a “cold turkey” process. It is not a conscious rejection of one’s own culture and language. It’s a subtle and sneaky process. Like what happens with life, it happens when we are occupied thinking of something else.At 20 years old, I was occupied doing something else. I worked in English and had anglophone friends. I worked in the mall and later in an enormous call center. I lived with a high school friend. We would talk in English, like anyone having attended an ultra-minority francophone school. My social circle would be centered around work. I had boyfriends and I eventually moved with one of them. A few years passed.As I stood proud to be Acadian and to talk French, the circumstances made it so my life was almost entirely in English. The only people I would talk French to would be my parents, and it was not often. And my words got asleep one by one, without realizing it. By dint of hearing only “umbrella”, “parapluie” faded. Same for “épicerie”, “étagère” and “casserole”, all depressed and gone to bed.To replace a few words for some English rings and feel like a chiaquization, no worries. But words keep hiding, and eventually, they get rare. I don’t know what is “too much” when we’re talking of lost words in a progressive assimilation. There would be a great interest, actually, to exactly quantify where is the point of no return. When is our language so rusty to the point to which we’ve got little ability to come back? It is an issue that would require an urgent attention, because an incalculable number of francophones are burying words without knowing it, at this very moment.For me, the point of no return was one day, when I was talking with my mother and I couldn’t make complete sentences. I could no longer find my words, that were not in their places in my head.And I was ashamed. Deeply ashamed.Me, daughter that was raised in a family extremely involved in the cause. Me, the first to do all her schooling years in the first French school of my region. Me, daughter to a woman that fought so I would have a French school, that founded the francophone school council of my province, that still bears the scars of the struggle that it did for the cause of homogenous francophone schools. Me, daughter of a man that actively chose to no longer be a francophone in his youth, that was saved from this grave mistake by my mother, and to whom the linguistic rehabilitation served as a horror tale to me. Me, that spent her teenage years in the volunteering network. Me, that had lived the first Acadian World Congress as a small girl, that made other people experience the one in Nova Scotia. Me, that french girl.Me, Céleste to Francine to Julius to P’tit Freddie, the Acadian from Halifax, I would not have been able, even with a knife on the throat, how to tell you the French word for “scar”. I was so ashamed that I still feel the scar today. That shame saved me by forcing me to take action before my mother would announce my linguistic death to the family. In the ultra-patriotic context of my family, to undergo assimilation, no matter the normality of the situation, would have been, no kidding, a death. They would have mourned me as a daughter of Acadia. The line of descent would end with me. […]All I want is to live in French. Really live. Not asking a service in French to the government. Live. Not see a spectacle once in a while. Live. Not finding constantly some lost-francos to whom I have nothing to offer if not government services and spectacles once in a while. Live.Live. Laugh. Cry. Love. Hate. Live. […]However, apart from my speech, they could live here an entire life here never realizing there are other francophones in Halifax. For me, the potential was always obvious. All it requires is to create an accessible and recursive social kernel to pick up the lost-francos, and once a certain critical mass shall be reached, the ball will roll by itself. These people will launch initiatives, and our auditoria, far from the downtown, will be crammed. When we will bump into lost-francos in this city, we will be able to give them rendez-vous and to allow them to meet francophones like them.However it is not like that today, and it is not going to happen soon. As long as this community won’t bet on gathering the citizens and spin a social web between them, nothing will happen. Since always, Halifax is a community welcoming francophones from everywhere, and has always been under the leadership of people with diverse origins. But 25 years later, we are hundreds to have passed by the francophone system, to be the products of those decisions, to have grown there. Our needs are not a priority, and young people have a weak commitment to the community (and often, francophonie in general), and they disappear in the English fog as soon as graduation. And nothing changes.“the unreasonable here is so marvelously heroic that we only have one desire: to encourage all these descendants of adventurers to stay valiant”—Stefan Zweig, Austrian visitor in Québec, 1911« Parler français en Amérique du Nord est un acte de résistance. »(Speaking French in North America is an act of resistance.)—Zachary Richard, famous Franco-Louisianian singer

Yes and no. Yes if the constant pressure is not maintained. No if that constant pressure remains. French could disappear as fast as in a time range of a century or two if we give up on it.I already explained on Quora what would happen if the Charter of the French language was abolished at this moment :Montréal would not be a “bilingual” city, it would be an unilingual English city, like it used to be for 35 years in the 19th century. French would be a language of translation, and the translation would get worse and worse as in the end, they would not even bother and use Babel Fish/Google Translate instead of even hiring actual translators.It would still be second-class to Toronto because the process of moving economic activities to Toronto started quite soon actually, and was structural. Nothing would have prevented it. People looking at statistics could have anticipated it as soon as 1913.99.9% of immigrants would send their children to English schools (remember the previous language law of Bourassa allowed for free choice). In these schools, French would be an optional class and most would not bother to take it. It’s already hard enough with language laws, imagine without!Anglos and Allos in Montréal would not become bilingual. They would be unilingual in English. They would never make a single effort to be accommodating without being forced to.There would be a category of assimilated Francophone that would expect to have the same social participation as actual French-speakers. They would DEMAND that every Francophone institution be available in English so they can be part of them, and then force everybody to talk to them in English all the time, while not doing their duty of learning French. They would be an Anglicising presence. [This actually happened in New England.]Montréal would be a much more boring city, being way less different from other North American cities. It would be like la Nouvelle-Orléans : it would have some French heritage, but no organic French-speaking presence anymore but a few French-speaking immigrants that would be quite unrelated to the local French colonial history. Actual French-speakers would not live there and in fact would avoid the city. One does not go to la Nouvelle-Orléans to meet Cadien people to speak with.They would speak a sort of chiac in Laval and Longueuil.Every single job offer at all, except maybe the job of janitor and even then I’m not sure, would require proficiency in English even in Trois-Pistoles and Sept-Îles.French schools would require a rule forbidding the use of English in the classrooms or in the school’s playground, because if left alone the children would speak in that language all the time. They would have contempt for their own culture, find it folklorical, and lose proficiency in French as soon as they would graduate from their English-speaking high school. The French schools in general would be the object of contempt and ridicule and nobody would want to go there, not even the private ones. An English university would open in Trois-Rivières but all of the students would actually be local Francophones. French speakers would be ashamed of being born French and just wish to their children to never even be aware of where they are from, in order to not feel the shame.The French-language activists would radicalize, they would have their journal called La Sentinelle. [La Sentinelle was the journal of the last resistants in New England. After bitter struggles against the Irish episcopate, they ended up giving up. The Francos were too assimilated to be saved.] Maybe some activists would set off bombs. Language politics would be much more violent. Demonstrations would look like when the alt-right and the antifa meet each other: they would end up in riots.You would read articles like those:http://tagueule.ca/2013/11/13/le-suicide-de-lontario-francais/http://tagueule.ca/2013/05/10/appel-a-la-mobilisation/http://tagueule.ca/2013/04/18/600-000-questions/http://tagueule.ca/2012/11/23/faudrait-sen-parler/Mon assimilation, mon exil – Céleste GodinThis last one in English is especially interesting:http://tagueule.ca/2012/04/02/a-letter-to-my-franglo-ontarian-friends/A letter to my franglo-ontarian friendsTo my English-speaking French friends,Your names are Paquette, Lafleur, Lalonde, Belanger, Tremblay, Gauthier, Veilleux, Lemieux, Giroux. It might be hard to pronounce, or you might just pronounce it in English. Some of you may have two francophone parents, some of you only one, and some of you have never heard your parents utter a single word of French, despite their names being something like Jean-Pierre or Jacqueline.You may have graduated from a French high school, you may have switched over to immersion, or you may have gone to an English school. Hell, you may even have a French college degree.You may or may not know me, but you certainly know someone like me, probably with an accent aigu in their names, who actually spoke French in high school, brought French movies to watch in primary school, and likely tried to recruit you to go to some activity/concert/whatever in French, very often at the risk of social ridicule.Some of you may have cousins like me, whom you make an extra effort to speak French to at Christmas. You may have had a childhood friend like me, who learned English from watching Power Rangers with you. You may even have dated people like me, only to feel awkward when meeting your in-laws and being forced to admit you can’t speak French very well.I’m writing to you today as a well adjusted young man, an active member of the francophone community in Ontario. Since finishing high school, I’ve been involved with a variety of francophone organisations in the Sudbury area, and I’ve been trying, through various means, to find a way to make speaking French more normal for francophones in Ontario.I spent 3 and a half years studying in Montreal, where – despite what alarmist politicians and die-hard hockey fans would have you believe – bilingualism is a normal, accepted, (controversial, still) every-day thing. I returned to Northern Ontario about two months ago, and got right back into my francophone involvement. I participated in the launch of this site, and my job as a college recruiter allowed me to travel throughout the North, speaking with francophone students about pursuing their education in French.I say all of this because I want to ask you a question.It’s a question that has been bothering me since I was little, since I understood that speaking French in the schoolyard was not the best way to make friends. I’ve wanted to ask you this question every time I hear things like “I’m French but I hate speaking it” or “French music sucks”. I’ve wanted to ask you even more since I found out that some anglophones in Montreal have more respect for the French language than many “francophones” from my hometown.My question is this: do you even care? Do you even want to keep speaking French? Do you want people to fight for the right to have francophone nurses and doctors? Do you want people to keep taking significant financial risks by bringing francophone artists over here? Do you want us to complain about the signage in a Caisse Populaire being in English?Of course, faced with these kinds of questions, many of you will say that you understand the importance of the French language, that you wish you spoke it more, and that you will send your children to French school, so they won’t lose the French and so they can speak to their grandparents.So what’s the problem?I want to know if you care that French schools are filled with kids who don’t really care about French. I want to know if you actually watch French TV, or press 2 for French service. I want to know if, when you go to Montreal for Spring Break or Osheaga or UFC, you speak French to your servers at the restaurant. Quite honestly, I didn’t always use French during my years in Montreal, nor do I today in Sudbury. But I do speak it regularly, in multiple contexts, and most importantly, I can appreciate the influence bilingualism has had on my identity.I want to know if it is worth it for me and my like-minded friends to keep defending the place of French in this province, and in this country. I want to know if you’re behind us, or if you simply don’t care and are happy to get by in English without having to use French. An honest answer would, at the very least, be a weight off my back.As francophone Ontarians, we have a double burden. Not only do we have to justify our use of the French language to our Ontarian landlords, but we have to justify our outlying presence to our Quebecker cousins, who quite often can’t take us seriously, despite being genuinely surprised and happy when they actually do meet someone from Ontario who speaks decent French. We are straddling Canada’s traditional two solitudes, and if anyone can help anglophones and francophones understand each other, it is us.Let me be clear: I’m not blaming anyone. French is hard as fuck to learn when you have no reason to do so. Even the upper echelons of francophone decision-makers are at a loss for meaning, for purpose, and for solutions to our accelerating assimilation rates. I just want to know what you, my English-speaking Franco-Ontarian friends, think of this mess of an officially bilingual country we ended up in. I want to know if it’s still worth fighting for.Céleste Godin (translated by me, English in italics):Mon assimilation, mon exil – Céleste GodinThe issue with words is that sometimes, they stay asleep. It is the result of a long-term rest. By dint of living in an English town, of consuming American culture in English, and even speaking English to my housemates without realizing it, I have words that are becoming shy. There is a plethora of words that are strangely exotic to me. Not because they are complicated or chic vocabulary words. They are exotic to me because it’s been years I did not hear them. To hear them, again, whatever the context, makes me repeat the word loudly and with brio, as if they just were invented. I keep the best ones in my calepin (CALEPIN!), so I won’t lose them too quickly: Catéchèse. Débile. Gigoter. Fauve. The words I would spontaneously use instead would be in English (“notebook”), or a mix of simpler and less accurate French words (« les petits cours plates que t’es forcée à prendre avant la messe »). […]People tend to not believe me when I tell them I came close to lose my French. When we are perceived as a poster child/black sheep of the francophone/Acadian cause, people don’t believe one could lose one’s French. But assimilation is not a “cold turkey” process. It is not a conscious rejection of one’s own culture and language. It’s a subtle and sneaky process. Like what happens with life, it happens when we are occupied thinking of something else.At 20 years old, I was occupied doing something else. I worked in English and had anglophone friends. I worked in the mall and later in an enormous call center. I lived with a high school friend. We would talk in English, like anyone having attended an ultra-minority francophone school. My social circle would be centered around work. I had boyfriends and I eventually moved with one of them. A few years passed.As I stood proud to be Acadian and to talk French, the circumstances made it so my life was almost entirely in English. The only people I would talk French to would be my parents, and it was not often. And my words got asleep one by one, without realizing it. By dint of hearing only “umbrella”, “parapluie” faded. Same for “épicerie”, “étagère” and “casserole”, all depressed and gone to bed.To replace a few words for some English rings and feel like a chiaquization, no worries. But words keep hiding, and eventually, they get rare. I don’t know what is “too much” when we’re talking of lost words in a progressive assimilation. There would be a great interest, actually, to exactly quantify where is the point of no return. When is our language so rusty to the point to which we’ve got little ability to come back? It is an issue that would require an urgent attention, because an incalculable number of francophones are burying words without knowing it, at this very moment.For me, the point of no return was one day, when I was talking with my mother and I couldn’t make complete sentences. I could no longer find my words, that were not in their places in my head.And I was ashamed. Deeply ashamed.Me, daughter that was raised in a family extremely involved in the cause. Me, the first to do all her schooling years in the first French school of my region. Me, daughter to a woman that fought so I would have a French school, that founded the francophone school council of my province, that still bears the scars of the struggle that it did for the cause of homogenous francophone schools. Me, daughter of a man that actively chose to no longer be a francophone in his youth, that was saved from this grave mistake by my mother, and to whom the linguistic rehabilitation served as a horror tale to me. Me, that spent her teenage years in the volunteering network. Me, that had lived the first Acadian World Congress as a small girl, that made other people experience the one in Nova Scotia. Me, that french girl.Me, Céleste to Francine to Julius to P’tit Freddie, the Acadian from Halifax, I would not have been, even with a knife on the throat, how to tell you the French word for “scar”. I was so ashamed that I still feel the scar today. That shame saved me by forcing me to take action before my mother would announce my linguistic death to the family. In the ultra-patriotic context of my family, to undergo assimilation, no matter the normality of the situation, would have been, no kidding, a death. They would have mourned me as a daughter of Acadia. The line of descent would end with me. […]All I want is to live in French. Really live. Not asking a service in French to the government. Live. Not see a spectacle once in a while. Live. Not finding constantly some lost-francos to whom I have nothing to offer if not government services and spectacles once in a while. Live.Live. Laugh. Cry. Love. Hate. Live. […]However, apart from my speech, they could live here an entire life here never realizing there are other francophones in Halifax. For me, the potential was always obvious. All it requires is to create an accessible and recursive social kernel to pick up the lost-francos, and once a certain critical mass shall be reached, the ball will roll by itself. These people will launch initiatives, and our auditoria, far from the downtown, will be crammed. When we will bump into lost-francos in this city, we will be able to give them rendez-vous and to allow them to meet francophones like them.However it is not like that today, and it is not going to happen soon. As long as this community won’t bet on gathering the citizens and spin a social web between them, nothing will happen. Since always, Halifax is a community welcoming francophones from everywhere, and has always been under the leadership of people with diverse origins. But 25 years later, we are hundreds to have passed by the francophone system, to be the products of those decisions, to have grown there. Our needs are not a priority, and young people have a weak commitment to the community (and often, francophonie in general), and they disappear in the English fog as soon as graduation. And nothing changes.“the unreasonable here is so marvelously heroic that we only have one desire: to encourage all these descendants of adventurers to stay valiant”—Stefan Zweig, Austrian visitor in Québec, 1911« Parler français en Amérique du Nord est un acte de résistance. »(Speaking French in North America is an act of resistance.)—Zachary Richard, famous Franco-Louisianian singer