We Canadians could give lessons on the bad manners that can arise around minority languages -- especially when people start staking out rights entitlements in language territory. The truly bilingual are actually a small minority; the rest of us manage some degree of compromise between expression and comprehension. A few (probably about the same proportion as the truly bilingual) flat-out refuse to learn The Other Language or refuse to use what they know of it. For them, it's clearly a rear-guard action in an ideological war.

I live and work in Ottawa, a genuinely bilingual border city with a very ethnically mixed population. I'm not sure which is the minority language here, but there are days when I think it's the Queen's English.