This same kind of linguistic facism is being played out in various parts of Spain, too. In Cataluña, the regional government has passed laws so that the use of Spanish in schools is prohibited. They must be conducted in Catalan, a romance language used by many in that area. That's quite a headache for the people that have moved from other parts of the country to work in or around Barcelona who do not and never will speak Catalan at home to have to send their children to schools where they have to study in a language they don't know. I hope it's not gotten to that stage in Quebec. (At least French is spoken in a lot of places in the world. Outside of northeastern Spain and a couple of islands in the Mediterranean, nobody speaks Catalan.) The local laws about the use of Catalan do extend into the business place. To what degree that effects web sites and the language used in program interfaces, I do not know. The Quebec law sounds similar to laws that exist in France about the use of French. French web sites are required to use the French language on more than 50% of the site. An American university that has an extension school in Paris was called on the carpet a few years ago by French authorities because their site was mostly in English. (They were trying to recruite American students to go to France.)

>>An aside: I read an article today that says that Quebec is starting to slam locally-hosted websites that are not bilingual. Is this for real? Jeez....
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>That's for real. Even worse - the Quebec govt. just recently lost a court case launched by french speaking employees in the pharmaceutical industry - the ministry in charge of language decided that they could no longer use english software on their desktops. The employees took the govt. to court and won, the ministry back-pedalled and said they only meant that the employer had to make available a french version of the software where one was available, yadda, yadda. Total bull. The pharmaceutical industry was a test case for them, and if nobody had balked, their intention was to apply the same restriction to all other sectors in Quebec. The same happened with the web sites - the language law here (Bill 101) orginally dictated that ALL advertising, commercial postings, etc. had to be in French only under threat of fines, revocation of business permits, etc. That was gradually softened so that languages other than French are permitted on signs if they are no larger than half the
>size of the French version. Personally, I don't think that's too unreasonable - it helps preserve and promote the French identity of Quebec. However, the govt. again suddenly decided that web sites were considered commercial postings, and were covered by the same law under threat of fines, revocation of business permits, etc. When the first victims sqawked, the minister in charge first offered her "interpretation" of Bill 101 - that the pages could be unilingual english only if they were hosted on a site physically located outside of Quebec! Talk about making it up on the fly! So the pattern is that they have a broad, all-encompassing law that they arbitrarily interpret any way they want, with fines, threats, etc., up until (if ever) someone decides to take them to court, after which they back off half the time.
>To really make the point, the latest language related embarrassment I remember was several months ago - a restaurateur here in Montreal was being threatened with fines from the Office de la Langue Francaise - the offence - the Double Diamond beer coasters for he was using contained a phrase that was in english only!