What happens at home doesn’t always stay at home.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
The language spoken at home is an imperfect indicator of the health of French. But not useless either.
It helps to predict the language that will be used at work, in school and in culture.
The decline in the proportion of Quebecers with French as a language spoken at home should not come as a surprise. We have few children — on the island of Montreal, the fertility rate is 1.2. And in return, every year we welcome immigrants who, for example, grew up speaking Arabic, Chinese or Hindi.
Obviously, they are not being asked to give up their language and their culture. The language policy aims for something else: that they integrate in French, and not in English, into their host society. To strengthen living together.
The new Statistics Canada study focuses in particular on the mother tongue and the language spoken at home. Labor figures will be released later this fall. But already, yellow lights come on.
The mother tongue measures the past. The one used at home deals with the present and influences the future, that is, the language that will be passed on to the children. Statistics Canada combines them and then adds the knowledge of French and English. This creates an important indicator: the “first official language spoken”. In Quebec, for English, this rate has gone from 12% to 13% over the past five years.
This decline is likely to have repercussions elsewhere.
A strong correlation can be observed between the language spoken most often at home and that in the public square (commerce, work, etc.). The Office québécois de la langue française measured it1. Among those who use Leclerc’s language at home, 90.2% prefer it in the public square. Among allophones and anglophones, the rate is 53.8% and 19.8% respectively.
Home language also influences cultural preferences2.
A common criticism of “home language” is that polyglots don’t know which box to tick. However, we can partly circumvent this pitfall by asking what is the language most often spoken. And anyway, this methodological problem does not change the other setbacks noted by Statistics Canada.
Some examples :
There is an increase in the number of unilingual Anglophones in Greater Montreal. Like Michael Rousseau, boss of Air Canada, they manage very well to live without speaking French.
There is also an increase in the number of Quebecers with English as the language spoken at home.
Meanwhile, the rate of English speaking French speakers is on the rise. On an individual level, this is good news.
But collectively, this will aggravate the phenomenon where a group of French-speakers change their language when a single person arrives who does not understand. Because they’re proud to be able to, and because they want to be accommodating.
Optimists will counter that 93.7% of Quebecers are able to carry on a conversation in French, a slight drop from 2016 (94.5%). However, what counts is not the self-declared ability to speak a language. This is its use. And this choice depends on the value we place on it.
Do Francophones want to protect their language? The answer varies according to age… In November 2020, Léger reported that among 18-34 year olds, 42% of respondents considered it “rather or very important” to be greeted in French in businesses in downtown Montreal. Among those aged 55 and over, the proportion was 63%.
In other words, demographics play against French.
Certainly, thanks to Bill 101, Francophones and allophones will go to primary and secondary school in French. But for CEGEP, they are more attracted than previous generations to English. Those who study there are more likely to attend university in English and to work in that language.
French will not disappear. But it is eroding and losing its symbolic charge. It serves less and less as a cultural base and tool for integration. It is transformed, in Greater Montreal at least, into a simple mode of communication among others. The report becomes utilitarian and optional.
Even if the language at home is an imperfect indicator of the vitality of French, it allows us to anticipate several setbacks. And anyway, you can choose the indicator and the methodology of your choice. Because the trend is clear: everywhere, French is declining.