Darryl:
Love the fiction about "winning the pig". My first wife sometimes, just possibly with some justification, used to accuse me of making up answers to questions when I was poorly armed with facts. We were living in the Okanagan Valley in the '70s - from our living room on the hillside we could look north and south a very long way up and down Okanagan Lake. At the southern end of the lake is a town called Naramata. I wondered out loud what "Naramata" might mean in the language of the Okanagan people - Marion immediately said that it was Okanagan for "the place where the sun always shines". Made sense to me, Naramata's like that. It wasn't until we were having a dinner party for a number of other folks, and I repeated the story, that I found out it was just a bald-faced lie. Hoist on my own petard, I was.
Yes, most French-speaking Canadians are in Quebec, and yes, there are quite a few Quebecois who speak little English. But this this changing in both dimensions. 2001 census data: Canada overall, 59% English as mother tongue, Quebec, 8.3%; Canada overall, 23% French as mother tongue, Quebec 81%; Canada overall, 18% with neither French or English, Quebec, 10%; Canada overall, 17% bilingual English and French, Quebec 41% (10% Canada other than Quebec). 3% of the population of the country speaks Chinese (either Cantones or Mandarin) as their mother tongue.
I doubt that this is a hell of a lot of interest to other on this board - I often find myself a but frustrated in my search for even more Guild arcania when we drift off like this. But it sure got me going.
Cheers,