Upon his arrival in Djerba in Tunisia to participate in the 18e Francophonie Summit, Prime Minister François Legault said he wanted to set the record straight about his policies for the protection of French in Quebec and make Prime Minister Justin Trudeau understand that they will have to work together, in particular because “at 48% of Francophones on the Island of Montreal, the situation is worrying”.
Once again, François Legault will have missed an opportunity to recognize that the Quebec Francophonie presents multiple and diversified contours that cannot be reduced to the single language spoken most often at home. Beyond the undeniable need to promote, enhance and protect French as a common public language in Quebec, it is becoming increasingly evident that the government’s inability to take into account the linguistic dynamics of Montreal in all their complexity and their variations only fuel a rhetoric of exclusion that does not bring anything promising to the public debate.
The fact that in 2021, 84% of the population on the island of Montreal could carry on a conversation in French (90% in the metropolitan region of Montreal) will therefore be considered irrelevant. We will brush aside the fact that, in addition to these 48% (956,000 people) speaking only French most often at home, there were 16.7% more (331,500) who spoke French there. equally or regularly as a secondary language.
The sustained decline in the relative share of the population speaking only French most often at home on the Island of Montreal seems quite inevitable and will be difficult to stop.
This is partly explained by the fact that the vast majority of this population has French as their mother tongue (nearly 90% in 2021), that immigration is the main source of population growth there, that seven permanent immigrants out of ten in Quebec have a mother tongue other than that and 55% of them speak their mother tongue most often at home.
With regard to these immigrants, it should be noted that among the approximately 442,000 people with an other mother tongue on the Island of Montreal in 2021, less than 10% spoke only French at home (40,000). But if we also take into account the multilingual people who regularly spoke French on an equal basis with another language or on a secondary basis (156,000), this proportion is close to 45%.
A process that takes time
Adopting French as the main language used at home is a process that takes time – sometimes more than a generation – and one can only remain perplexed by some of the solutions, sometimes simplistic or without significant impact, that d ‘any are proposing to reverse in the short or medium term the downward trend in the relative share of the population speaking only French at home on the island of Montreal.
Moreover, by placing so much emphasis on the role of immigration in the decline of French at home, we tend to underestimate the influence of intraregional migration on linguistic dynamics on the island and in the greater Montreal area.
For example, between 2016 and 2021, 73,825 more Quebecers with French as their mother tongue left the Montreal CMA for the rest of Quebec than people who came to settle there from another region of Quebec. In comparison, the negative migratory balances of the English- and other-mother-tongue populations are -4,800 and -3,245, respectively.
Ultimately, faced with a government discourse that seems to be primarily concerned with the presence of French as the main language of use at home, even though Quebec’s language policy is striving to make French the common public language, we have to go back to an integrationist and civic approach that recognizes the complexity of Montreal in the making.
To ensure the sustainability of the Francophonie in Montreal and Quebec, we must considerably increase resources and measures (efficient and flexible) to francize immigrants who do not know French, promote and promote the use of French by all, including Montrealers whose first language is French. Above all, we must refocus our thinking on what it means to be francophone in Quebec and recognize that it is up to each individual to define their relationship to the French language and to appropriate it in their own way. Ignoring the reality of multilingualism at home and in the public space prevents us from taking full measure of the presence and use of French.
Finally, an open dialogue and partnerships are needed with the English-speaking community in order to bring all Quebecers to embrace and defend the French fact as a collective marker of Quebec culture, while recognizing the essential vitality of English.
* The author is a member of the scientific committee of the Observatory of the French language (International Organization of La Francophonie)