You may have noticed that there are two schools of thought about the future of French in Quebec. The one that includes demographer Marc Termotte, author Frédéric Lacroix, mathematician Charles Castonguay, the Parti Québécois, now the Coalition avenir Québec and the generalist who writes these lines, who believes that a heavy trend is undermining the place of French in Montreal and preparing for a probably irreversible decline. Our detractors sometimes call us the “declinists”. Why ? Because we are concerned about the decline of “home language”, that is to say the language spoken in homes and therefore transmitted to children.
The members of the other school – the demolinguist Jean-Pierre Corbeil, the researcher Jack Jedwab, several feathers of the daily The Press, the Liberal Party of Quebec and Quebec solidaire (let’s call them, for the sake of balance, the “reckless”) – do not deny the existence of this decline in the homes. But that doesn’t matter, they say, since these people are bilingual, speak French in life, in businesses and in public services, the main thing being that once they leave their cottages, they mainly speak French to each other them.
To challenge this point of view, I use the image of the tree. Its sheets represent all people who know and speak French, whatever their language of origin or mother tongue and whether it is their first, second or third language. All these leaves, it’s beautiful. But the roots of the tree are only formed by those who have French as their first language (for centuries or very recently), who therefore have this language and this culture as their main identity and who, therefore, hold on to it. We are at the heart of the difficulty of linguistic prognosis.
What would happen if we had a window on this future, therefore not only on the future of the language of use at home, which is declining, but on a foreseeable decline of the language of public use? This is the window that the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) has just opened with a study published in mid-December and which made very little noise. In 2021, the organization carried out a massive survey of 6,000 young people aged 18 to 34 and asked them in which language they preferred to shop in stores.
To better understand these results, I will target the place where the future of the language is at stake: the island of Montreal. I will compare them to what would be an ideal (utopian?) situation where 100% of these exchanges would be in French, a really common language. In addition, I will use a previous study by the OQLF as a point of comparison.
Therefore, in 2016, 16% of Francophones of all ages on the island mainly used languages other than French in the public space. What about young Francophones seven years later? 26% of them did not prefer to be served in their language in shops.
Let us turn to the allophones of the metropolis. In 2016, 48% of them publicly lived in a language other than French. Seven years later, 64% of young people in this group said they did not prefer to be served in French.
As for English-speaking Montrealers, only 16% of them spoke mainly French in public spaces seven years ago. Today, 7% of young Anglos on the island say they prefer doing business in French.
Since the mortality rate of the species is still 100% despite the progress of science, the young will eventually replace the old, and it is their preference for them that will prevail. Moreover, the younger they are, the less they prefer French. Across Quebec, compared to 30-34 year olds, Francos aged 18-23 are 10% less likely to prefer French in shops, Anglos 34% less and Allophones 55% less. The downfall is rapid. There is an additional dynamic at play.
Since there are fewer and fewer Francophones on the island, and their desire to do business in French is crumbling, the trend towards the eventual predominance of English as the public language is clearly programmed in these figures. It only remains to be seen if the decline of French will be linear or if it will accelerate. I let the demolinguists, mathematicians and statisticians warm up their spreadsheets to make their projections.
This means that real progress in knowledge of French is not enough to induce the use of French in the public space, and even less to make it the preferred language.
Could there be an aggravating factor in our society? The OQLF study points to one: English-language CEGEPs and universities. Thus, 96% of young Francophones pursuing post-secondary studies in French prefer doing business in French. Those who study in English? At 79%. Allophones who study in a French-speaking CEGEP or university will prefer to do business in French at a rate of 82%. If they are in English-speaking establishments, this drops to 48%. For Anglophones, the rate drops from 86% to 37%.
In short, my carefree friends who believe that the future of French rests on the foundation of the language of public use should, in view of these terrifying results, plead for the immediate application of Bill 101 to CEGEPs, if not to the university!
I will end with this other example, calculated by Charles Castonguay, which illustrates better than any other both the complexity of our situation and the danger of relying on knowledge of French as the guarantee of our future. Castonguay has shown that between 2016 and 2021, 5% of young Francophones aged 25 to 35 on the island have become… Anglophones. They still have, for the most part, French as their mother tongue. They still speak it very well. But, at the beginning of this period, they declared that French was their first, main language. At the end of this period, they declared that English was their first, main language.
My conclusion: it’s time to put carelessness behind us.
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