4471.html

[Damaged Justice <frogfarm@yakko.cs.wmich.edu>]

   Web Anglais? Non, S'il Vous Plait --> Ashley Craddock -->
   [1]arrow Web Anglais? Non, S'il Vous Plait
   by [2]Ashley Craddock
   
   9:02am  17.Jun.97.PDT When Quebec computer-store owner Morty Grauer
   got a letter telling him to get rid of his Web page, change it, or
   else, he rolled over. But he wasn't happy about it.
   
   "I don't need subpoenas, fines, or going to court," Grauer told the
   [3]Montreal Gazette. "But what gets my goat is when they make me do
   something. I'm enraged right now. How can they tell you what to do on
   the Internet?"
   
   But according to the Quebec's Office de la Langue Francaise, they can
   do it pretty easily - jurisdictional issues notwithstanding. Because
   Grauer's Web site was in English, because it was on a Quebecois
   server, and because it had no French component, his [4]microbytes.com
   was illegal, plain and simple.
   
   "The Micro-Bytes Web page violated the Charter of the French
   Language," spokesman Gerald Paquette said Monday. So on 29 May, the
   OLF sent Grauer a letter, threatening to revoke his certificate of
   "francization," a legal necessity for businesses with 50-plus
   employees. Grauer has said he will comply as of 1 July.
   
   Crafted in the pre-Internet 1970s, Quebec's Charter of the French
   Language stipulates that commercial publications such as catalogs,
   brochures, leaflets, and commercial directories must be available in
   French. It also denies English-language education to immigrants, even
   those from English-speaking countries. (A separate Canadian federal
   law on bilingualism has a much more limited scope, requiring the
   government to publish information in both English and French.)
   
   In the separationist furor that has raged over Quebec for decades, the
   charter has been a highly controversial bulwark against anglicization
   and cultural dilution. In Montreal, large businesses are bilingual. On
   the streets, English words are no longer displayed. In homes and
   schools, the phrase, "le weekend," common parlance in France, is
   almost never heard.
   
   But whether or not the 20-year-old charter will have any teeth in the
   age of the Internet and free trade remains unclear.
   
   Although the charter has been relatively successful in terms of
   maintaining linguistic purity, its economic effects have been harsh:
   An estimated 300,000 residents and 1,000 businesses have left the
   province since the law was passed. And the Internet is expected to
   exact a high toll for such linguistic balkanization: An estimated 90
   percent of online communications are in English, only 2 percent in
   French.
   
   In France itself, where linguistic purity campaigns have recently
   taken on some degree of political chic, language activists have sued
   three sites under a 1994 law that bans single-language advertising in
   any language but French. The suits, which would have tested the law's
   application to Web sites for the first time, were dismissed last week
   on a technicality.
   
   In the free-speech-happy Internet, however, a four-year-old United
   Nations ruling may prove the most ominous indicator for attempts to
   enforce language purity: After reviewing the case of an
   English-speaking Canadian forced to call his funeral home a "salon
   funeraire," The UN's Human Rights Council found that the Canadian
   charter was in violation of the free-speech provision of the
   International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
   
   Still, the Office de la Langue Francaise is determined to hold the
   linguistic line.
   
   "Quebec wants to be a player in the global market, but there's a real
   chance it will erode our sense of language, of identity," Paquette
   said. "It's the same thing with the Internet: We feel threatened by
   it. It gives us the possibility of communicating with French speakers
   in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and North Africa, but English is the
   lingua franca of the Web. If we don't enforce this law, that'll only
   be more true in the future."
   Related Wired Links:
   [5]Web Sites Foil Canada's Election Poll Ban
   3.Jun.97
   [6]Canadian Election Law Prompts Web Site Battle
   27.May.97
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References

   1. http://www.wired.com/news/top_stories/
   2. mailto:craddock@wired.com
   3. http://www.montrealgazette.com/
   4. http://www.microbytes.com/main.html
   5. http://www.wired.com/news/topframe/4221.html
   6. http://www.wired.com/news/topframe/4081.html
   7. http://www.wired.com/news/top_stories/
   8. http://www.wired.com/news/search.html
   9. mailto:newsfeedback@wired.com
  10. mailto:tips@wired.com
  11. http://www.wired.com/wired/full.copyright.html