Imagine a hypothetical scenario where Canada is founded by the French and that French is the sole official language of Canada. Canada is also in the top 20 of immigrants coming to America.
So, what would the language landscape look like? Could it be the 3rd most common language spoken in America behind Spanish? Would it be more common in the bordering Northern states than elsewhere like Spanish is to the Southwest?
Edit:
I meant to say that the mother tongue of Canadians is French in this case.
28 comments
Maybe? depends on how many French speaking Canadians immigrated to the US. Spanish is so popular here not so much because of the official language our southern neighbor, but more so because of how many of our southern neighbors immigrate here on a yearly basis.
French is not a common language in Canada period. The only province it’s popular is Quebec and as a Canadian I do not identify with the French language or even Quebec for that matter. If you’re not speaking English in Canada you’re probably speaking Cantonese or Punjabi
And no. I don’t think the Americans would be influenced by that. They kind of run the show and we are the followers when it comes to be movement change
Along the border, maybe. But we don’t get near as many immigrants from Canada as from Spanish speaking countries so it wouldn’t be as pervasive.
Canada is a LONG way from that, though. French Canada is just one chunk and even they are mostly bilingual.
I mean, I guess it would have to be as much business is done between the two countries, but I’m not sure popular would be the right word. More “necessary.”
https://compote.slate.com/images/8cb8cbaa-2e08-4bd3-a07d-b2f0defa150f.jpg?crop=918%2C605%2Cx0%2Cy0&width=960
French is the second most common language in the few states that border Quebec, so maybe? I think the overall penetration would depend on how large and widespread the French Canadian immigrant communities go. You can find Americans with Latino heritage all over the US, but I don’t know that many people who identify as Canadian American. I would imagine Canadians tend to assimilate a bit quicker as well and would lose French language skills within a generation or two.
It would probably be more commonly spoken in bordering states than it is now, but I think it’s more likely still that many if not most Canadians would just learn English as their second, “unofficial” language. There’s simply more of us than there are of them, and as much as online Canadians might disagree, they kind of rely on us more when it comes to doing business.
Would Buffalo and Detroit be like San Deigo and El Paso?
I would say yes.
If by “official language” you mean “primary language spoken across the country” then yes, unquestionably.
With how Spanish is received within the states, probably not (since Spanish is the second most common language in the US and the entire southern countries speak that mostly). So I don’t think French would be that accepted here.
No because the Canadians already use a different kind of French that the French use
American who learn French overwhelmingly learn the French version of the language
No.
“It is wrong to be French.” -Al Bundy
Probably not. The main reason Spanish is so popular is how many Mexicans and South Americans come here for jobs opportunities or fleeing a bad situation.
Canada on the other hand is comparatively more stable. There’s not anywhere near the number of Canadians coming here. Not that it doesn’t happen, but at nowhere near the same scale.
So even if all of Canada spoke French primarily I don’t think it would be much more popular.
It might be the 3rd most spoken language but that’s like being the second most popular sport here after NFL. As in it may be the next most popular after Spanish but you don’t have to be too popular to be the next most popular cause everything after Spanish is orders of magnitude smaller.
Yes
No. Almost nobody in America speaks French as their first language.
I mean, probably. French was a popular enough language to learn in school where I was and I’m sure our proximity to Quebec and the history of French expats in cities such as Lowell and Woonsocket helped to promote that to some degree.
In order for French to become the 3rd most common language in the US, it would have to overtake Chinese (the data combines all types) which is a more popular language globally and locally in many parts of the US. It would also need to become more spoken than Tagalog, Vietnamese and Arabic. Even as a close ally, I’m just not sure one small nation changing their everyday language to French would raise French up 4 places and over other very common languages.
In this hypothetical, I think we might be actually *less* likely to be speaking French. A large part of our French speaking population came during the Expulsion of the Acadians, once the British took Canada off of France’s hands. Those were the people who moved to northern New England or Louisiana, etc.
If it stays French, and there’s no Expulsion of the Acadians, we don’t get that.
(There’s a lot of important consequences of this “what if” that aren’t directly to do with language- like, how did our Revolution play out with a non-British Canada next door? what happens when the French Revolution happens? Or Napoleon, or the Vichy Regime?- but let’s leave them be for now.)
In general, French colonization was driven more by economic reasons, and less on population pressure (like the English).
(That’s one reason the Louisiana Purchase didn’t end up giving the US a load of Francophones the way the Mexican-American war ended up with the US controlling territory full of Spanish speakers- there *were* people there, but they weren’t primarily speaking French, they were Native Americans speaking their own languages.)
IRL, New France’s entire population in 1754 was 69,000. The eventual US-colonies would be about 2.5 million then, Mexico more like 5 million. Even now, Canada has about 38 million people compared to Mexico’s 127.5 million. Unless you’re really changing history more than just the languages, I don’t see Canada having the influence that sheer population pressure brings.
No, because we don’t care about Canada.
The population of Canada is like 10% that of the US. If enough of them moved to the US to make a dent in our national demographics then the country of Canada would pretty much collapse.
I suppose since French is already the 6th most spoken language in the US it might move up to third (overtaking Vietnamese, Tagalong and Chinese).
Even if that happened, it still wouldn’t change much the grand scheme of things. Most people would still only speak English and most of the Canadians moving here would learn English.
If Canadians only spoke French, then yes it would become more popular in the United States. Luckily, that is never going to happen.
In the grand scheme of things Canadians are irrelevant to Americans, they could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice
As a Texan I know some Spanish but not enough to converse. Basically I can order food in it.
I would imagine a similar dynamic if Canada spoke only French.
No I don’t think so
This is one of those, the more you think about it, the weirder it gets.
Canada was in contest between the French and the English. If the French had controlled Canada completely, there wouldn’t have been a struggle between France and England, at least not as much.
If France and England wasn’t fighting as much, France would not have overextended themselves to support the American revolution to spite the English.
Had France not overextended themselves with the American trouble, they probably would not have had the Napoleonic wars, or the French Revolution. There would not have been the special relationship between France and the USA.
Which would have meant that there were two very strong monarchies that have a weird history of competition and strife between them, but who are also intrinsically linked to each other. Which probably would have changed the course of World War I, which would have changed the course of World War II.
So this one little change would have drastically altered the course of world history in all the time periods since.
We’d probably get some of the Scottish folks who settled in Canada due to Commonwealth ties, shared language, and similar climate instead or possibly a few more wayward Irish who chose Canada. The English preferred the US.
Among border states? Absolutely. Places like Kansas? Probably not.
Probably, at least close to the Canadian border, in the same way that Spanish is pretty popular in the southwestern United States.
No. They tried that with Louisiana and the language never took outside of that region.