I was very lucky growing up, and my little middle school in my little village in Nova Scotia offered French Immersion (late, started grade 7).
Sure, some of my teachers were anglophone, but the rest were Acadian. When I went to university I didn’t think much about it, but soon discovered that I was functionally and operationally bilingual. I continued to study French at university where all of my teachers happend to be from la belle province and graduated.
Now I’m a professor in France. I’ve been doing this for about 17 years. My students greatly underestimate their level in English, yet here I am correcting 750-word essays written by 1st year students who have only “studied” English for an hour or two a week since middle school. Are they good? Meh… But they are better than they imagine.
Canada is supposed to be bilingual. I’ve seen different numbers fly around over the years regarding the percentage of bilingual Canadians. How about you, are you bilingual? How bilingual?
Addendum:
These maps are not directly related to the question, but I came across them while looking things up.
This is from 2016. I like showing this to my students. They always ask me why I bothered learning French.
And this is from 2021 and is a little bit related to my question, but only covers English and French.
I’ve completed the CCC test working for the federal government earlier this year. So in theory I am totally bilingual.
That being said, whenever any francophone hears my Anglo accent, they switch to English “for me”, meaning I can never just practice like I did when I was preparing for my tests at work.
I actually had my first positive franco-interaction in the wild just last month. Like a full interaction with a random person where they never switched to English after hearing my accent.
I was in Chelsea after hiking in Gatineau park, and someone pulled up their car next to me and asked me where a certain street was, and I told them “sorry, I don’t know, I’m not from around here”. It’s a small thing, but it felt good knowing it was the first time that had happened.
