Everybody's Wrong But Me

As a French-Canadian living in Vancouver, I almost feel it is my duty to share my opinion about this non-issue: French at the Olympics.

VANOC: Oppressing Olympic fans in both official languages

While I think that there are more pressing issues, such as the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, and the horrendous response from VANOC and the International Luge Federation, basically blaming the now-silenced victim for his own death.  Or the fact that the Olympic Cauldron is behind a fence that makes the whole site look like it’s in jail, which symbolizes perfectly VANOC mismanagement of the whole Olympic fiasco.  I’ll briefly write about the place of French-language at the Olympics.

I personally think that… it’s generally OK.  The overwhelm majority of Olympic-related signs in Vancouver are bilingual.  The Opening ceremony was in both official languages.  What many do not understand is that Vancouver, while being in Canada, is not a very francophone city.  And it is Vancouver who host the Olympics, not bilingual Canada.

Since John Furlong doesn’t speak French, VANOC could have a second person speaking in Molière’s language at the opening ceremony.  Other than minor elements such as the one previously mentioned, the 2010 games are fairly bilingual.  Or at least, as bilingual as Vancouver can get.

Of all the things that are badly managed by VANOC, the place of French at the opening ceremony, is a relatively minor mishap in my opinion.

Frédéric Van Caenegem

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 10:00 and is filed under Vancouver.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.