"Kanadanoj parolas la anglan kaj la francan."
Translation:Canadians speak English and French.
30 Comments
As a Canadian anglophone, Duolingo has been a major help in learning the other official language of my country!
have you read anything about the québec dialect? it's p different from metropolitan french but really fun to speak, id look into it if you ever go to québec (or just for fun aha)
After living in Montreal for 8 months, I refuse to speak in the French dialect. It now seems so boring in comparison :D I especially love the rhotic vowels in Quebec french
Ohohoh reading this on the metro (that's what we call our subway in Montréal) most comments here warmed my heart.. I'm usually ashamed of the way we speak French. thank you!
Groups and languages entirely glossed-over by the Anglophone/Francophone arguments... :/
This assumption that Canadians speak English and French (français québécois) is a neocolonialist myth that doesn't include the vast First Nations communities that speak Cree, Inuktitut, Ojibway and other indigenous languages. Nor does it include many recent immigrants who are not capable of communicating in either of the 2 "official" languages.
I think aŭ instead of kaj would be a better way to put this... And, as a stuck-up European: I don't know what they speak in Quebec, but I simply find myself unable to identify any of it as French ^^' It's really hard.
Or usually implies exclusive-or in English, so I'm not quite sure if aŭ would be accurate Esperanto. We are English inclusive-or French and sometimes native (unofficially, lots of Ojibwa around my home) speakers. It's mostly English in Western Ontario (which is home).
One could use non-standard 'kaŭ' (portmanteau of 'kaj' and 'aŭ') but, at least in my understanding, 'la anglan aŭ la francan' is inclusive or whereas 'aŭ la anglan aŭ la francan' is exclusive. Please correct me if I'm wrong
Well, many people speak it here in P.E.I, and we go through at least 5 years of french schooling, so everybody at least knows some.
Monolingual? A THIRD of Canadians are native to French. Like me. Je suis un Montréalais, mais le français au Canada est partout.
Oui, mais dans Ontario, Alberta et beaucoup des autres provinces le français est presque nonexistent........ Ici dans Ontario j'ai jamais écouté français de hors de ma classe, seulement le chinois et les langues indiennes
Yes, often, because you are referring to, in this case, the "English language" or the "French language". That is, "English" and "French" are adjectives here. Essentially we're just dropping the noun from "la angla lingvo" or "la franca lingvo" so that we're left with "la angla" or "la franca".
Unless it is dead or constructed (It belongs to all the people of the world) and has no cultural ties to a specific place, then it must have "la," as in "la angla." Note that "anglan" is not capitalized -- it is an adjective to the omitted "lingvo," as in "la angla lingvo."
"Esperanto" and "Latino" stand alone because they belong to the world, so they are proper nouns and are capitalized.
So yeah... Hope I helped. This was all explained in the Grammar Notes of Languages.
An anglophone from NB told me this really cool joke (please don't get mad people): there are two kinds of Canadians. The ones that are bilingual, and the anglophones.
As expected you get Québec-bashing bigots like Cyril to remind you how most of English Canada is ready to do anything to spread their hate of French.
Because "la franca" and "la angla" are short for "la angla lingvo" and "la franca lingvo". As someone helpful said earlier on this page, this happens with all languages that belong to a country our group of countries, but not to Latin, or constructed languages such as Esperanto and Volapuk. (You wouldn't normally say, "Mi parolas la Esperantan", for example. It's "Mi parolas Esperanton".
