Category talk:Franco-Albertans

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[edit] Definition

I noticed user:Bearcat tagged Paul Chalifoux article with this category. When I suggested that Chalifoux isn't a Franco-Albertan on the grounds that English is his native language, I was told that any Albertan of French descent is a Franco-Albertan for the purposes of this category. Is that established somewhere? It seems a little odd, since I live in Alberta and the designation "Franco-Albertan" is almost universally understood to refer to Albertans whose native language is French.Sarcasticidealist 00:53, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

It's not just "for the purposes of this category"; it's standard, right across Canada, for franco- demonyms to refer both to francophones and to people of French descent. Calling an anglophone of French descent "not franco-(Albertan/Ontarian/whatever)" is actually a demographic sleight of hand that deliberately hides the fact that French Canadians outside of Quebec live in a context where some of us inevitably lose some of our cultural roots. Pretending that we're somehow not part of the French Canadian community is essentially an assertion that nobody has any responsibility to care whether French is surviving outside of Quebec or not, that nobody has any responsibility to examine how and why somebody whose surname is Chalifoux wasn't raised speaking the language that his name would imply. The Franco-Ontarian article has been expanded much more thoroughly on the finer points of this than some of the others; read the section on "Franco-Ontarian identity" if you'd like some further clarification.

If you'd like to institute some kind of separation between "Francophone Albertans" and "Albertans of French Canadian descent", I wouldn't necessarily object to that. But people of French descent who've lost the language are still Franco-Albertans, whether that's how people tend to understand the term or not — saying otherwise would be like taking Ed Stelmach out of Category:Ukrainian Canadians just because he doesn't actually speak very much Ukrainian. A person's ethnic background doesn't change just because they don't actually use their ancestral language on a daily basis. Bearcat 06:52, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Update: It now appears that somebody has created a separate category for Category:Anglophone Canadians of French Canadian descent, so I've added Chalifoux to that category per this discussion. Bearcat 23:17, 18 July 2007 (UTC)