When it comes to the decline of French, the devil is in the details, and in the choice of indicators. The language data from the 2021 census was made public in August 2022, causing shock waves and countless analyses. French as a mother tongue has indeed fallen by almost two percentage points since 2016, standing at 74.8% in the 2021 census.
This Wednesday, Statistics Canada instead offered a historical perspective on languages in the country in tables that date back to older censuses, up to 1951. Based on this new publication, The duty submitted lesser-known facts to the magnifying glass of sociologist Jean-Pierre Corbeil, who has studied linguistic data for more than 25 years and is an associate professor at Laval University.
Historical data thus makes it possible to identify certain “very heavy tendencies which have existed for a long time” or even to identify certain “blind spots” in the debate on language, believes Mr. Corbeil.
Knowledge of French has been stable for nearly 40 years in Quebec.
If the government of François Legault mainly puts forward the statistics of mother tongue and language spoken at home, there is also a question on knowledge of official languages in the Canadian census. Nearly 94% of Quebecers report being able to carry on a conversation in French, a higher proportion than in 1951 and roughly equal to that of 2001.
“This growing capacity is explained by the adoption of the Charter of the French language in 1977 and other measures”, explains the researcher. The obligation to attend French-language school for immigrant children has contributed to this in particular, but has also encouraged Anglophones to enroll their children in French immersion schools, he observes.
But can we trust a person who self-declares “can carry on a conversation”? “It’s not a perfect measure,” he concedes, but the data on the populations of workers who use French at work also corresponds to about 95%. “At the very least, people who say they can speak a language are actually using it in their everyday lives,” he explains. The frequency of use, however, is a separate issue, “and in its own right,” he says.
On the other hand, the proportion of people who say they speak neither French nor English has been more or less constant at around 1% since 1951.
The proportion of unilingual Anglophones has decreased in Quebec.
The proportion of Quebecers who report having English as their mother tongue has declined since 1971, standing at 7.6% in the most recent census. As for knowledge of English only, 5.3% of respondents checked this box. Despite a small jump between 2016 and 2021, attributable in particular to the strong growth of non-permanent residents, says Jean-Pierre Corbeil, this statistic has never returned to the levels of the years 1951 to 1971.
“The story is quite simple. The phenomenon is essentially explained by the significant exodus of the English-speaking population in Quebec who left for Ontario and other provinces from the mid-1960s until 1981″, particularly after the arrival of the Parti Québécois in power.
Nearly half of Quebecers speak only French.
Bilingualism is steadily progressing in Quebec between census periods, notes Mr. Corbeil. There still remains 47.3% of the population who said they could only speak French in the 2021 census.
“This is what is often referred to as Quebec cut in two. People in metropolitan areas have a lot of contact with other languages” and on the other hand, a significant part of the population cannot express themselves in another language. “It’s a good argument for learning French, because it is spoken by the greatest number,” adds the professor.
Montreal is by far the most polyglot metropolis in Canada.
More than one person in five, or 21.5%, can speak three or more languages in the census metropolitan area of Montreal, according to Mr. Corbeil’s compilation. Taking only the territory of the city of Montreal, trilinguals and quadrilinguals number 31.6%, or nearly a third. “New arrivals want to learn French or already know it. But they realize that English is pretty much unavoidable in the Montreal area. […] That’s how we come together with very high levels of trilingualism,” believes Jean-Pierre Corbeil.