Earlier today, I returned from field work that included a trip to Canada. Border patrol agents from both nations have become extremely suspicious. The traveler is guilty until proven innocent. For the geologist, a commonly encountered problem is the transportation of rocks across borders. My professor imparted the parable of an Australian colleague who brought specimens to the United States making sure to bleach and scrub every square millimeter of their surfaces. Authorities are paranoid that foreign microbes will hitch a ride on the rock.
The paleontologist should never identify fossils as such; simply call them stones. In the mind of the C.B.P. employee, there is no difference between a common brachiopod and a Native American artifact.
Of course, there is no force field between New York and Quebec preventing the movement of microbes. But there does exist an unexpected linguistic wall. Not a single word of English dwelled in the hotel attendent's vocabulary. When my professor unsuccessfully tried to communicate our room number verbally and then with fingers, I had to intervene with quatorze. To obtain a cot for our room, I initially attempted to improvise a word for the desired object. After a couple minutes of floundering in French, I realized that je veux trois lits (I want three beds) would solve my problems.
Broader conclusions can be drawn from the lack of bilingualism in Quebec. Much of the region must be isolated from the rest of Canada or the United States. The city we visited is an outer ring suburb of Montreal, not an isolated bubble. A multilingual Quebecois colleague asked me if I thought the paucity of English speakers was at all surprising, understanding that to foreigners, there is an expectation that bilingualism is the norm. He then informed me that he was born and raised in the town in which he now resides, suggesting that geographic mobility is not common amongst French Canadians, even the most cosmopolitan.
The provincialism of Quebec is true for most of the world. In my home state of Minnesota, most natives return at some point in their lives, and a good number never live outside the state at all. Most small American cities are minimally connected to a metropolis through business, let alone foreign nations. Why should the inhabitants of a small town in Quebec need knowledge of a foreign language when most of them work as blue collar workers, or at service jobs that create a self-sufficient, although extremely codependent, local economy? The illegal immigrants of Los Angeles have few incentives to learn English although they regularly interact with English speakers. The varied dialects of provincial France yields another example, or Kafka's German in Prague.
Even as globalization allows for unprecedented economic codependence, it marches on silently through most of the world, only noticed when the Goodyear factory shuts down in that small Quebec town, or when Pop-tarts start to occupy the shelves of a depanneur. Companies extend tentacles across borders, disregarding the artificial barrier.
In some instances, globalization provides regions with greater cultural isolation. As Tony Judt points out in Postwar, tiny ethnic localities in European nations are able to rake in funds from the E.U. to preserve their cultural sanctity. If anything, these subsidies further decentralize Europe into a patchwork abstract. This centrifugal phenomenon is found even at the national level, giving more autonomy to provincial regions from the central government than at any time in the recent past--Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are an example that immediately springs to mind, in addition to Quebec.
Consider that the provenance of most of our material possessions spurs very few of us to learn Mandarin. There simply is no need.
