Yeah. This drink is nice
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The donuts not bad either
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I’m a quarter Cajun and my husband’s as close to 100% as you can get. We both have Mikmaq ancestry (which is from the Nova Scotia area, if I remember…), As a lot of Cajuns do, so no big deal.
The problem is we both speak ASL (American Standard Dialect) or pretty close to it, well over 90% of the time. People are always asking my husband where he is from, and he’s constantly having to explain that, yeah, he’s Cajun.
It’s not as aggressive here because Cajuns are laid back until you cross them, and we’ve got this weird place where we’re both a dying minority and a majority that flips back and forth so quick that its a bit like whiplash if you allow yourself to be sensitive over it (so we tend towards insensitive).
As for Asians up in that area, they may be running into the same issues the natives have dealt with for generations. I’ve not heard that type of grumbling out of our Vietnamese population. (And that’s our biggest Asian demographic, locally.) I do know that some of the older ones don’t speak English or read English well enough, and it’s a big issue when voting because you have to jump through hoops to have someone help you inside a voting booth, which makes the language a big issue for voting.
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I find it funny when a Cajun who speaks more French than I do sys “Speak English!” to any other language spoken.
I’m 40. I’ve seen it once or twice.
But I was more using it as a generic placeholder. Some laws have forced language changes. It’s why I don’t speak French at all. If there had not been a forecful removal of French from our culture, I’d probably speak it some.
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Yes, he said it was a standard practice, and wrote how it made him averse to speaking Cantonese and how the practice was humiliating for him. My daughter was never offered ESL, despite us marking Russian as other language spoken at home because of her grandma (English being the first one).
My husband is a high school teacher, and what he sees now a days is extended time requirements on tests due to language proficiency. He usually asks each student in private if it’s needed.
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Funnier too that it’s French. Isn’t the French government pushing for French language purity or something? They had some kind of authoritative organisation who keeps trying to push out English words from the French language, like instead of “e-mail” they want people to use “couriel” or something like that.
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I’m always of two minds about it. I don’t mind immersion into the dominant culture to assimilate.
It’s the edge of force that’s always the issue. My great-grandmother would get her hands slapped with a ruler for speaking French in school. Corporal punishment was common until about when I was born, but it made her avoid teaching her grandkids her native language, and her husband lost his English close to the end, which meant there were family members he couldn’t speak to, close to death.
All because she didn’t want her kids hands slapped with a ruler.
But this is milder than some groups went through, in the past 100 years. So, there’s a lot of latent animosity that comes from the history, that I didn’t personally experience because I wasn’t beat in school, and the few schools that offered that were ordered to call my father out of work to judge their decisions for punishment. I was very protected from what older people went through.
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I’ve known English all my life and I still can’t speak it properly.
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She’s from States, not Quebec
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Mais, I still slip into fast fast or veet veet when I should say faster.
And don’t get me started on how badly people strangle English without knowing a lick of foreign languages.
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Wow I never really thought about these things. History can really be brutal sometimes but on a positive note at least it shows that societal norms have changed towards the better. Mostly…
Still scary stuff being a non-native speaker back in those days.
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That’s said, language policies have to be cut-throat to preserve a language of a minority, because if they’re not, soon access to education and jobs in that language simply becomes inaccessible.
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Yeah but the ironic situation involved the French language.
Edit: I’m not sure if what I wrote made any sense.
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It’s some of the controversy surrounding children buried at schools, right now.
Yes, probably most of them died from dangerous fevers in an era when you don’t ship contaminated bodies home, just immediately buried them, but it gives the appearance of abuse and coverups when we already know that punishment could be harsh.
It’s cases that are too old for documentation, and a lot forensic work to prove what happened.
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Well it’s 5:30am and I have to be up in a few hours so I’m off for the night (day?). R.I.P. sleep.
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This is why the US still doesn’t have an official language. It allows the chaos over not forcing a singular language. Not that that stopped my people from being dominated.
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Language of education/signage/jobs is still English, right?
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It’s definitely defacto English. We only escaped that officially because it was a war of Dutch and English, at the time.
But often US documents are found in multiple languages: or at least offered, if not out in the open.
Commercially, the language in any given store is the culture of the owners. I walk into an Asian market and the one on this side of town has very little English. Other side of town, I think everything is marketed towards an English population.
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Anyway, it’s probably not a conversation I can contribute much to, because, I was always an isolated speaker, ashamed of my ethnicity to start with, and at the moment would give 10 years of my life to have zero accent and not look identifiably ‘that part of the world’. So effing tired of being Russian…
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