To live in Quebec is to become accustomed to daily reminders that French in the Canadian province is the most regulated language in the world. Try, as I did recently, to shop at Anthropologie online and you'll come up empty-handed. The retail chain (which bears a French name) opened its first Montreal boutique in October, but "due to the Charter of the French Language" has had its site shut down: "We hope you'll visit us in store!" Montreal's transit authority maintains that under the present language law its ticket takers must operate in French, which lately has spurred complaints from passengers. Last year, the City of Montreal erected 60 English safety signs nearby Anglophone schools in an effort to slow passing vehicles. The Quebec Board of the French Language and its squad of inspectors ordered that they be taken down; a snowy drive through town revealed that all had been replaced by French notices. Since the Parti Québécois, which calls for national sovereignty for Quebec, won a minority government in September, the reminders have become increasingly less subtle. In February, a language inspector cited the swank supper club Buonanotte, which occupies a stretch of St. Laurent Boulevard, Montreal's cultural and commercial artery, for using Italian words like "pasta" on its otherwise French menu. The ensuing scandal, which has come to be known as "pastagate," took social media by storm. "These are problems we had in the 1980s," says restaurant owner Massimo Lecas. "They were over and done with; we could finally concentrate on the economy and fixing potholes. And then this new government brought them all back. These issues might never go away now and that is a scary sort of future." It's true: Despite the nuisances and controversies generated by Bill 101, Quebec's 1977 Charter of the French Language, the province had settled in the past years into a sort of linguistic peace. But tensions have mounted considerably since the separatist PQ returned to the fore. In the wake of "pastagate," the language board allowed that its requests were(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=79818&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
Via: TIME GlobalSpin