On legislating an official language

From a recent New York Times piece:

Quebec’s government is finding more ways to lift the supremacy of French, the province’s lingua franca. Provincial laws mandate that English text on storefront signs be half the size of French words and the employers reveal what percentage of their staff cannot work in French. New immigrants are given a six=month grace period before French becomes the only language in which they receive government services, such as taking a driver’s test.

Having learned French as a young man in Quebec and retained enough of it to slaughter the language with some fluency to this day, I am at once qualified, and not qualified, to weigh in.

I enjoy French, Canadian French aka Québécois in particular. And having lived among the people, I understand the fear of losing their language and culture in a majority English-speaking country.

Yet.

Whichever language finishes by prevailing will be a matter of social tide that language-restriction laws can do only so much to stem. If English is going to overtake Quebec, there will be no stopping it by fiat. Meanwhile, draconian language laws serve only to further stoke naturally occurring Them vs. Us flames.

I realize that that’s an easy position for this outsider to take, especially an outsider whose native tongue is American English. But I might add that I feel the same way about the growth of Mexican Spanish spoken in many parts of the United States, of which I am a born citizen. If Spanish is some day going to take over, English-as-offical-language laws may slow but cannot stop it.

And the idea that my posterity may someday be Spanish-speakers doesn’t bother me in the least.