(Ottawa) The weight of English continued to grow in Canada and Quebec between 2016 and 2021, with the proportion of people whose first language spoken being French continuing to decline.
Posted at 9:14 a.m.
This observation can be made using new census data released Wednesday by Statistics Canada.
The government agency reports that the percentage of Quebecers speaking French at home has risen from 79% to 77.5% since the previous census in 2016.
If the number of people using the language of Molière has increased, from 6.4 million to 6.5 million, the proportion they represent has however decreased.
The data show that the proportion of people whose first official language spoken is French has fallen in the 17 regions of Quebec. The decline is more marked in Nord-du-Québec (-3.6 percentage points), Laval (-3.0 percentage points), Montreal (-2.4 percentage points) and Outaouais (-2 .4 percentage points).
Meanwhile, the number of people with English as their first official language spoken continued to grow in the province, rising from 12% to 13% from 2016 to 2017.
” [Le nombre de ces locuteurs] crossed the million mark […] for the first time in the census,” says the Statistics Canada report.
According to the previous census, the English-speaking community in Quebec grew more significantly between 2011 and 2016 than during any census period in the previous four decades.
The previous census also revealed that the proportion of Francophones outside Quebec had decreased over the five-year period.
The census release comes as Quebec steps up its efforts to protect French in the province, with its latest language law passed this year restricting the use of English in government services.