Defining the social focus of the anglosphere
Sunday 29 November 2009
I am in the process of writing an article on language in Canada (I might not really have written anything before I get back to England, so don’t hold your breath, lovers of the maple leaf and linguaphiles1). In the course of my Wikipedia research, I came across the following statement from the present Canadian Commissioner of the Official Languages:
[I]n the same way that race is at the core of what it means to be American and at the core of an American experience and class is at the core of British experience, I think that language is at the core of Canadian experience.
—Official Languages Commissioner, Graham Fraser, quoted in the Hill Times, 31st August 2009
Can we really define these three countries that simply? This troubles me. I know that class-consciousness is far more acutely tuned in the UK than in other places, and my present travels through the southern United States—and elsewhere in the country—have shown that racial considerations are still a daily concern. In fact I can only disagree outright with the suggestion that ‘language is at the core of Canadian experience’: it is really a question of where you live, since, for example, residents of British Columbia can rely on English as a true lingua franca, whereas in some of the eastern provinces (primarily, of course, Quebec) the conflicting relationship between French and English is more of a concern.
What then, Mr Fraser, is at the core of the ‘Australian experience’? Apologizing for things you had nothing to do with? (Zing.)
Notes
- Yes, that’s right: I just coined a bastard compound. Deal with it. Or would you rather I’d written ‘glottaphiles’? ↩
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