The weight of English continued to increase in Canada and Quebec between 2016 and 2021, with the proportion of people whose first official language spoken being French continuing to decline.
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 decreased in all regions of Quebec, except Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine.
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).
More than one million English speakers in Quebec
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.
“For the first time since comparable data have been compiled, the number of people with English as their first official language spoken has crossed the milestone of one million speakers in Quebec in 2021,” says the Statistics report. Canada.
Among these speakers, more than 7 out of 10 were in Montreal or Montérégie.
In general, Statistics Canada explains the growth in the contribution of Shakespeare’s language to the fact that its speakers are on average younger and therefore have a lower death rate. Migration, particularly from other provinces, also has an impact, the report notes.
It should also be noted that the weight of English as the first official language spoken has been increasing across Canada since 1971. From 2016 to 2021, it rose from 74.8% to 75.5%.
“As in the past, immigration has contributed to this trend since it is towards English that the majority of immigrants turn after their arrival in the country. For example, in 2021, 80.6% of Canadians whose mother tongue is other than French or English […] had English as their first official language spoken, compared to 6.1% who had French. »
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 studied.
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.