Actually for the most part province to province its english. I live on the west coast where it is mostly english. But in the east lots of french and english. Different dialects and so forth like your southern accents and your brooklyn accents and so on. Here its your Ontario accent, maritimers, and the westerners...sure theres a few others... Ontario french and Quebecois french?
Plus First Nations languages that are still used...dont know how if there are that many left who still speak them though unfortunatly.
In Vancouver, where i have lived in the past and still live a short distance away on Vancouver Island, there is a lot of oriental people. The majority of the people who live there i think are oriental. Even though the language is
'officially' english if the majority of people are chinese shouldnt there signs be in there language? If you go into chinatown or little italy or whatever i would expect the signs to be in that language. i know the official language is english but if the majority of people coming in are not english then sometime down the road, much to my english speaking dismay, the official language will change...wont it? I guess what it comes down to is: 'Do i expect the people in my country to speak english (or french)?' I don't. I live in a multi cultural country with two official languages and i still don't expect you to learn my language. But thats just me and my opinion.
Your right though about the street signs though. This is why virtually everywhere i think there is the universal octagon stop sign, triangular yield etc. It might say 'arret' or 'stop' but its still a big red octagon.
World without borders.
Anyways thanks for debating with me a little Milamber. I do see your side of the story and i respect it...sucks to be in your own town and not know what all the billboards say! Billboards?...er...Then again...
If in the far flung future the EU and the Asian Pacific Consortium and the United African States and the Union of all other Nations join to form One Nation on One Earth...what will the official language be? The language that the majority speaks? How about none...
For some reason i thought that the US did not ever specify that it had an 'official' language. And i wrote my earlier posts with that in mind. I thought it was always assumed that it was english. But I dont know why i thought this, a stray thought...just dumb i guess.
[This message has been edited by Djinn Raffo (edited 07-25-2001).]