The study of French, one of Canada's two official languages, is being nudged aside by Spanish, Mandarin and a host of others in some Alberta classrooms.
Edmonton is leading the way. More than 2,250 children are enrolled in bilingual programs in languages other than French in that city's public-school system. There are just 1,895 students in French immersion.
This fall, both Edmonton and Calgary will launch the country's first publicly funded bilingual Spanish program. Already 114 families have signed their children up in Edmonton; the Calgary board has capped enrolment at 175.
"We promote French to the extent that we can, but we don't think that Canada is just limited to that; Canada is a multicultural nation," said Emery Dosdall, the Edmonton board's superintendent.
Besides, he said, given a globalized business world with 300 million people speaking Spanish, the language programs are important "for the economic survival of our community. If my children were in school today, I would look at Spanish or Mandarin. Those are great languages for children to have in the future."
Spanish is the latest addition to an Edmonton roster that already includes bilingual programs in Arabic, German, Hebrew, Mandarin and Ukrainian, some of them dating from the mid-1970s. (Calgary, too, has a small Mandarin program.) Students spend half of each day studying in one of these languages, and half the day in English. The province also has pilot bilingual programs in Blackfoot and Cree. Alberta has no requirement that children study French.
The province's bilingual programs are being hailed as a model for other provinces, which offer only sporadic bilingual programs.
In parts of Newfoundland, Inuktitut is offered; in Vancouver, there's a bilingual Mandarin program, but it's small next to that city's French-immersion program. Public schools in Toronto, the country's most diverse city, offer a vast array of language courses, but no bilingual programs other than French immersion.
"Despite the fact that we tend to pat ourselves on the back in Canada as being the multicultural good guys -- compared to the United States who have a 'race-relations problem' -- Canadian policy in relation to languages other than English and French has been characterized by an enormous lack of imagination except, ironically, in Alberta," said Jim Cummins, an authority on language instruction in Canada based at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
The Council of Ministers of Education of Canada is concerned about flagging interest in French immersion. After rapid growth through the 1980s, the programs have flat-lined. In elementary school, for instance, second-language immersion enrolment outside Quebec dropped to 166,190 in 1996-97 from 172,830 in 1992-93, according to Statistics Canada.
Paul Cappon, the CMEC's director-general, said he doesn't see the matter as a competition among languages, but he is concerned that "if you lose the enthusiasm for the [French]language, you're going to lose enthusiasm for the cultural attachment as well."
It may come as a surprise to learn that a bilingual Spanish program will first hit Canadian soil in Alberta. There are about 30,000 Spanish-speaking people living in Calgary and almost 22,000 in Edmonton. Some Alberta-based companies have flourishing oil and gas operations in Central and South America. The government signed an agreement in 1998 with Spain, which is contributing a consultant's time to advise the education ministry, Alberta Learning. The province has given the two boards a total of $100,000, and corporate donors are also being sought.
Sean Fine