(quebecers here)

Not language racism but english-phobia. Everyone that I know will switch to english to help people, but they expect that the reverse will be true too. You will be expected to at least attempt French. Attempting it will be enough and people will gladly help you out.

I lived in Montreal for 6 six years, as a student and for my first job. I speak a bit of French, but not much. One day in Place Ville Marie I was getting a coffee at Starbucks. I accidentally bumped into someone in line, and I said "sorry". He snarled at me angrily and said "Get out of here, go back to Toronto". I don't think I had never been to Toronto at that point in my life.

Mostly that does not happen. Mostly people are okay if you try to speak French. But if you slip up or bump the wrong person, your English can certainly make you the target of hateful and mean language.

There is also a forced, legal "racism" against language, in that it can be prohibitively difficult to start a company in English. There is a systematic approach where the government and the locals will make your life more expensive, more complicated and less likely to succeed unless you do fully understand French.

Edit: That said, I love Montreal. It's probably my favourite city in North America, I miss it tons and tons. I live in the Bay Area now, but feel like Montreal is my home and I can't wait to go back.

> There is a systematic approach where the government and the locals will make your life more expensive, more complicated and less likely to succeed unless you do fully understand French.

Sucks to say it so directly, but that's the point and people vote for exactly for that (people also vote against this, so don't put everyone in the same boat). There was abuse up to that point, so the laws are harsh now.

In our history, there was a lot of oppression agaisnt french speaking people so people are still pretty afraid. The only contact that anyone over 80 years old had with english speaking people are from oppressive boss that abused them at work. I do agree on that point that the older population can be racist, but anyone under 30 should be more understanding. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec#Quiet_Revolution

Yup, you can forget a director-level position unless your last name is Tremblay or Gauthier. Grew up in Montreal and loved it, but bounced to SF the second I had the chance.

Quebecers are my favorite Canadians!

But there is definitely language racism, especially with the language laws.

Here are some examples to prove my point:

On a phone call with the government to renew an ID card, my bilingual Montrealler friend messed up her French grammar. The government agent said "I cannot understand you" and hung up the phone! Made her call back and wait on hold and be more careful with her grammar.

The Bitcoin Embassy put up a webpage for international Bitcoin trading targeted to people beyond Quebec who speak English, and yet the Language Police stopped them because they hadn't translated everything to French before publishing the page! The government prevents international business simply because it's not French enough. But the whole point of international business is to target OTHER people.

My friend is COO of a large, successful international enterprise software company (I won't mention the company). All his programmers use English keyboards, but his company will be shut down if they don't use French keyboards. So they keep a stash of French keyboards in the closet. Every few months, the Language Police do an inspection and they have to bring out the French keyboards and pretend that they are using them to do all their work as good French citizens.

This last friend has lived in BOTH Palo Alto and Montreal for the last 15 years, and before that lived in France and Iran. He says that Quebec is more Racist than France.

I've heard stories about inspection for the keyboards but never experienced it myself. I only have been working for the past 5 years but for something you say happen once a month, it look like I'm pretty lucky. I'm on an English keyboard by the way.

I guess there is language racism, people here are expected to speak English when most of us doesn't handle it that well. When we travel in an English country, we have to speak in English, when we travel to a Spanish country, we do our best to talk Spanish, we expect the same of you. Sadly even people that have been here for a long time doesn't even try to learn French. Most of the superior I had are only speaking English.

Don't you learn Spanish as a second language in US? How would you react if you would be expected to use Spanish that much?

> My friend is COO of a large, successful international enterprise software company (I won't mention the company). All his programmers use English keyboards, but his company will be shut down if they don't use French keyboards. So they keep a stash of French keyboards in the closet. Every few months, the Language Police do an inspection and they have to bring out the French keyboards and pretend that they are using them to do all their work as good French citizens.

Wow, French here, I find this most shocking. Can't the programmers use the French keyboard all the time but simply map it to the US layout (I do that myself).

Only the physical products need to be in french. The reason behind this is that an employee that doesn't know a word of english has to be able to use all the tools without having to ask for a french version (a french speaking employee in a workplace where the management is english speaking may get discriminated against otherwise).

My keyboard is french, but its layout is english and so is my OS and all my softwares. However, I had to change the language myself since everything come out of the box as french.

Of course there is racism, there is racism everywhere. The difference with Québec is that the racists are racist against wealthy white people who are not use to be on that side of the medal.

> So they keep a stash of French keyboards in the closet.

Here, even if we are french speaking, we simply stick french stickers on things. No need to buy extra products this way ;)

Stickers work too, but I'm guessing that in their case they just don't want to deal with applying stickers to a lot of keys and then removing them. We also had to put some stickers on vending and coffee machines.

We used to be audited every year but after we made a lot of progress they starting coming once every 2-3 years.

I think they started auditing after complaints, we're a manufacturing company in the suburbs with 99% French speaking employees but a lot of the stuff we had was English only. Fun fact, our parent company in Texas was careful and made sure we had French documentation/communication but French speaking office employees didn't seem to care.

It is sad to me that nobody in this thread knows what racism is.

'wealthy white people'

Like.. the... French Canadians?

I find this is a culture that pervades most of Canada (with perhaps the exception of Waterloo). It's a culture that follows, not leads and innovates.

We're all for pretending to be like Silicon Valley… but not trying anything new :)

In the tech sector, I would agree. In other industries, however, I would strongly disagree.

I'm just curious; which other industries?

Resource Extraction. For instance, just about every oil well drilled around the world likely has Canadian-developed equipment on it.

Exactly! Like in Seattle: a culture of fitting in, rather than standing out.

I'm sorry you had to go through some bad experiences. However I think you're unfairly judging the city:

Corrupt government: The fact that we talk about corruption does not mean its worse than elsewhere.

Quality of higher education: Well, you've left out the whole of French speaking universities. And what does "good" mean? Just looking at budgets, you're not comparing on equal footing: Stanford ~5.5 bn USD, Concordia <400 mil CAD.

Culture: Well, any way you look at it, you're comparing two very different environments. Historically extremely different, just take language as a factor, and you're also comparing arguably the most fertile region in the world in regards to computer science, with another region that has historically been deemed worth only of manual labor (pre 1960's).

And the big one, language racism:

I know literally no one who would qualify as a "language racist" in the same sense of "race racist", and I've lived here a quarter century. If you're coming to live in North America's biggest French speaking city, why are you surprised if people want to speak in French? Of course it's hard to learn, but I'd say Montreal is the best place to learn French for an English speaker, as you will not have trouble being understood anywhere.

I mean, would you find it reasonable for me to learn English if I wanted to work and live in Berkeley? Some friends of mine are moving to Italy and they have to learn functional Italian to be allowed to move (per them).

The language issue is the most annoying issue with foreigners or international students. Being in University so long I've had my share of discussions with such people, and a lot of the time the sentiment could be distilled to "I have many other things to do then learn French, maybe I'll do it when I have more free time, it's hard." To be fair, I've also met greatly motivated students who spared no expense to practice their new language. Just showing some interest/effort goes a long way...!

Come back anytime :)

In southern states some legislators have been trying to pass "speak English" laws for a long time. These laws seem to never get passed because they're deemed to be discriminatory. In Quebec however, those types of laws are here and being enforced. If you went to San Diego and told the guy with the Mexican food stand that he had to have English menus, you'd get called a racist.

As someone who has lived in Montreal my entire life and is perfectly bilingual, I can tell you I've had many discriminatory experiences while speaking English. Not to mention it's very easy to test these things out when you are able to do certain things in both English vs French to compare experiences. If you speak in English you often get a different, and more negative experience. Given that I speak perfect French, it's very easy for me to simply ignore most of it, but don't kid yourself, it's still there. Just because there's a bad history doesn't excuse the current state of affairs.

I also find, contrary to your experience, that it's those Anglophones who did not grow up here who tend to excuse the discriminatory laws and practices the most.

Well, you have to take the legislation in its context, which obviously I don't have to explain to you. You can't just compare Québec with the American South (read some Charles Taylor for more detail as to why). As for getting a negative experience when speaking English, that really depends on where you are in the city, but I'm surprised you'd get "lesser" treatment. I agree there are assholes everywhere.

My own experience on the Anglo side of town (i.e. further west of St-Laurent), is that a lot of people simply cannot speak French, but will usually understand you, and the conversation can be had in two languages simultaneously. I wouldn't consider this "negative" treatment, but it's definitely not ideal for social cohesion.

In the end, someone has to make the effort of learning another language, and that annoys some people.

been here 3 years and don't recognise your issues at all, I found it a friendly place.

I'm sure they loved you thinking they move in herds and are sub-standard to US schools tho.

So, you were in MTL for ~1 year? Working / studying?

I find it a bit troubling that you list beautiful women as a plus of a city, as if women were a natural resource like trees or clean water.

I also don't know what you mean about Montreal not being edgy enough. There's plenty of counterculture in Montreal. Did you ever spend a lot of time in Hochelaga?

The language laws have a very good historical basis. Used to be that the bosses all spoke English and the employees all spoke French. That's the reason for the language laws, so that nobody in Montreal cannot access local jobs due to lack of French and that nobody is ever spoken down in English. Seeing how the linguistic majority is French, think of it more as affirmative action than racism. It's about levelling a historically unlevel playing field.

>I find it a bit troubling that you list beautiful women as a plus of a city, as if women were a natural resource like trees or clean water.

As a Montrealer, I would say that we have beautiful people living here in general. OP is likely heterocentric in their commentary.

>Did you ever spend a lot of time in Hochelaga?

Not much of a tech scene...but incredibly progressive/beautiful attitudes. Also, very French. If you don't have the language, you're missing 80% of it.

I think a good bit of the incredibleness of Montreal is kept at arm's length through the language barrier.

I grew up mostly with English friends and never spoke French. These days, I spend a lot more time with French friends and I feel much more at home.

> I grew up mostly with English friends and never spoke French. These days, I spend a lot more time with French friends and I feel much more at home.

I went through the same, actually. I "grew up" in the McGill bubble, but when my French got better, it's like a whole other city opened up to me.

>I find it a bit troubling that you list beautiful women as a plus of a city, as if women were a natural resource like trees or clean water.

Seriously? It's like if I told a gay friend when they said they were thinking about moving to SF because (insert missing phrase) - that they were (insert missing phrase); who are you to say liking a type of people is wrong.

Cities are different - and I assure you that some cities have more beautiful people than others.

> language racism

That's not racism. Stop calling it that. Piggy-backing on the plight of actual victims of racism isn't cool.