A new poll reveals that more Canadians report a strong attachment to their main language than to any other marker of identity, including the country itself.
The survey conducted by the firm Léger for the Association for Canadian Studies specifies that 88% of respondents declared a strong feeling of attachment to their main language, while 85% revealed the same thing for Canada. A greater importance of language was particularly noticeable among Francophones and Indigenous peoples.
Strong attachment to main language is notably more important than those to ethnic group, geographic region, racial identity and religious affiliation.
The president of the Association for Canadian Studies, Jack Jedwab, believes the survey results highlight the important role language plays in people’s identity. In his opinion, the importance of language should not be minimized given what it represents for a community, because it has the dual function of facilitating communication and being an expression of culture.
“We haven’t historically paid enough attention to Indigenous languages, which we now see our federal government investing heavily in, trying to help maintain and revive them,” Jedwab observed.
Among Canadians whose main language is French, 91% reported a strong sense of attachment to their language, compared to 67% who reported the same feeling for Canada. In Quebec, more people reported a strong sense of attachment to their main language than to the province.
Only 37% of Canadians reported having a strong sense of attachment to a religious group.
Soon data on languages in Canada
The findings precede the release of recent Statistics Canada census data on the country’s languages.
Jack Jedwab says the publication of the census will be particularly important for Quebec, where there is close monitoring of the state of the French language compared to other languages.
The Léger poll also revealed that more than half of French-speaking Quebecers say they know English well enough to hold a conversation. This contrasts with less than one in 10 Anglophone respondents in all provinces except Quebec and New Brunswick who say they can hold a conversation in French.
According to the last census, English-French bilingualism rose from 17.5% in 2011 to 17.9% in 2016, reaching the highest rate of bilingualism in Canadian history. More than 60% of this growth in bilingualism is attributable to Quebec.
The online survey was conducted among 1,764 Canadians between July 8 and 10. It cannot be assigned a margin of error.