MONTREAL - I recently returned to Montreal after living in the United States for 14 years, mostly in New England. In the last few months, as I went through the gantlet of government paperwork that comes with returning home after a prolonged absence, I kept myself busy helping my mother with her small business, specifically with marketing and developing promotional material, upgrading her website, etc.

Navigating the rough waters of bilingualism is no easy task. Of course everything needs to be bilingual, and any sign needs to respect the law by appropriately giving French prominence. But it is work, hard work, and it’s expensive. After living exclusively in English for almost 15 years, calling everyone by their first name, having to relearn the complexities of when you should “vouvoyer” or “tutoyer” has been humbling.

I have also been following with great interest the constant bickering over language issues, from “Pastagate” to “yogourt-spoongate” to why some Société de transport de Montréal employees won’t speak English. This is my take:

I was born south of the border by fluke. My father was finishing his master’s degree in Indiana, and I was born there before returning to Montreal and being raised in French by my French-Canadian parents. I didn’t become fluent in English until my late teens. These days, however, English comes more easily to me, even though I was raised in French, most of my schooling was in French and I now work almost exclusively in French.

New England was a comfortable destination for a Montreal expat. A lot of things are familiar: French street names, Catholic churches, Catholic cemeteries full of tombstones with French names. Catholic religious services there very often still include French hymns. Interestingly, it seems the Refus Global and the Quiet Revolution didn’t quite have the impact in New England that they did in Quebec; the services there almost seem like a fossilized version of pre-1960 Quebec religion. After attending numerous funerals and weddings during my stay in Connecticut, and getting used to a much more formal setting, I was shocked by how laid-back and inclusive the Quebec services were when I was up in Montreal attending a baptism or other religious service.

Between 1850 and 1950, over a million French Canadians packed up their belongings, loaded up their large families and headed south to New England with the hope of creating a better life in the towns and cities there. The promise of jobs in the textile mills that were popping up on the East Coast was a call that many answered. But the Industrial Revolution offered limited options for people forced off the land; most ended up in cramped, insalubrious living quarters in the most unsavoury parts of town. When you drive around New England now, a hundred years after the height of this exodus, the signs of it are everywhere, from the architecture to the large Catholic churches with French names.

You almost expect to hear French.

But you don’t.

The very last French-speaking New Englanders are in their 90s. Their children and grandchildren don’t speak French.