I was very lucky growing up, and my little middle school in my little village in Nova Scotia offered French Immersion (late, started grade 7).
Sure, some of my teachers were anglophone, but the rest were Acadian. When I went to university I didn’t think much about it, but soon discovered that I was functionally and operationally bilingual. I continued to study French at university where all of my teachers happend to be from la belle province and graduated.
Now I’m a professor in France. I’ve been doing this for about 17 years. My students greatly underestimate their level in English, yet here I am correcting 750-word essays written by 1st year students who have only “studied” English for an hour or two a week since middle school. Are they good? Meh… But they are better than they imagine.
Canada is supposed to be bilingual. I’ve seen different numbers fly around over the years regarding the percentage of bilingual Canadians. How about you, are you bilingual? How bilingual?
Addendum:
These maps are not directly related to the question, but I came across them while looking things up.
This is from 2016. I like showing this to my students. They always ask me why I bothered learning French.
And this is from 2021 and is a little bit related to my question, but only covers English and French.
Same here … except my language is Indigenous … my first language is Ojibwe-Cree which both my parents spoke and English was our second language. For the first ten years of my life I only spoke my language and English was a foreign language.
As an adult that’s only used English now for most of my life it’s the other way around … I now speak more English than Ojibwe because there’s only a few hundred people that still speak my language and my specific dialect.
I’m still fluent in my first language … I just don’t have anyone to speak to.
Thanks for sharing your story. As distant as our background is, I have the same problem of not really having anybody with whom to practice my native language on a regular basis.
On the other hand I’m grateful to all the people who have put the effort to learn English, giving people like me a chance to learn something from them, which wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Hang tight on it.
Meet people online or provide online classes, or recorded classes that can last for generations.