Trudeau Lives
Trudeau lives on in Trinidad and Tobago:
English is the language of almost all of its inhabitants. Football and cricket are its national sports. And its main business hub is called Scarborough. But, eyeing the markets of Latin America seven miles off its shores, the former British colony of Trinidad and Tobago is rejecting its Anglo-Saxon past and aiming to be Spanish-speaking by 2020.
Children returning to the classroom this month will take obligatory Spanish lessons, and civil servants are also expected to reach a basic level of Spanish, at present spoken by just 1,500 of Trinidad’s 1.3 million citizens. Thirty per cent of public employees are to be linguistically competent in within five years…It may seem surprising that the introduction of a new language has met little resistance in a country which, before March, had had English as its official language since Britain gained control of the islands from Spain in 1797.
What’s really poetic about it all is that the change over is being run by a government ministry called the Secretariat for the Implementation of Spanish – i.e. Big SIS. That probably isn’t funny in Spanish though.
Anyhow vous pensez à cela la prochaine fois que vous voyez le français sur une boîte de Shreddies. Could be worse.
