Perhaps I can blame my error on typing one letter at a time on my cell phone last weekend in Ottawa by candlelight. I was visiting friends when the violent storm whipped through the Ottawa area and power was lost. When I wrote about Ingeborg’s special ninetieth birthday, I wrote that she and Jim Fulford had spent five years in the Netherlands where they were raising their five daughters. However, it was fifteen years! Their three youngest girls were born in Holland.
The girls came back from Holland all fluently bilingual in English and Dutch. Their oldest daughter was also fluent in Danish while the other girls knew a lot of that language from Ingeborg and from visits to Denmark. In school in Holland they learned English as a second language and German as a third language and they picked up quite a bit of German. In their last year of living in Holland, the girls were given French lessons as they were coming back to Quebec. How marvelous it is to have a wide range of languages to be able to better communicate. Ingeborg and Jim then learned Spanish when they lived in Mexico.
As we are living in the aftermath of the passing of Bill 96, the Fulford family is an example of how openness to languages is the way to go instead of the suppression of languages.
