Originally Posted by
rickg523
But I've never heard a French person complain that the crew didn't announce in French on a plane in North America.
In fact, IME the whole "French language arrogance" meme is an obsolescence from the 1960's. I speak beginner-level conversational French, will never be mistaken for a Frenchman, and have only had positive reactions - or a switch to English - to my (admittedly pathetic) attempts at speaking French. But then again I don't ridicule the French when they butcher English either.
I'm pretty sure that French usage on flights in Canada (between two anglophone cities) is a highly political issue and there have been complaints from French speakers if they couldn't get French service on say a flight from Calgary to Toronto.
I also have to nix the idea that all AF cabin crew are fluent in English. I probably would have assumed that as well but then I ran into Air France FAs that struggled. I'm not saying they couldn't speak *any* English but they certainly struggled with speaking fluently and kept pausing to search for words etc. and instinctively switched to French mid-sentence, that kind of thing (i.e. classic 'I took classes but am not fluent' level speaking of a language).