Language) because they had a complaint from a neighbor about the
apostrophe on the sign for his plumbing company: Bob’s (Figure 14.7).
Figure 14.7 Bob’s Plumbing
The Quebec office of the French Language is responsible for enforcing
the language legislation, which outlaws apostrophes in public signs. The
reasoning here is that the province laws stipulate French-only on all public
signs, and there is no apostrophe in the possessive form Bobs, in French.
Bob was given a $599 fine and a $187 delivery charge for the ticket. If
he did not pay within the week, his pickup truck, farm tractor and car
would be sold at an auction in his yard. Bob paid the fines, and solved the
problem of the apostrophe by covering it up with a sticker of the Canadian
flag.
Summary
Americans tend to think of monolingualism as the default. For whatever
reason – educational gaps, ideology, mythology – most of us imagine that
Spanish is spoken in Spain, Polish in Poland, and so on.
In fact, monolingualism is the exception across the world’s populations,
and that is the case even if you exclude consideration of immigrant
languages. This is quite logical if you consider for a moment that national
political boundaries change over time, usually as the result of war or its
aftermath. The current boundaries of France include areas which were
once Spain, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Germany. When the borders
moved, the populations (for the most part) stayed put. For example,
Occitan is a romance language closely related to Catalan. There are native
speakers and small Occitan language communities in France, Monaco,
Italy, and Spain. Occitan is just one example of the dozens of indigenous
languages in Spain other than Spanish.