Promoting Francophone immigration currently seems to have a consensus in Quebec as a measure to promote the maintenance of French. The profile of immigrants that Quebec wishes to welcome is – and will be – largely linked to the international space where there are already more than 325 million Francophones.
We can also rejoice that the An Act respecting the official and common language of Quebec, French assigns the Statistical Institute of Quebec (ISQ) a central role. The ISQ has significant expertise in the field of producing statistical information, and the issues surrounding the French language in Quebec will require considerable efforts in terms of monitoring, researching quality information and development of indicators over the coming years. As part of this new mandate, the ISQ recently published on its website detailed tables on languages in Quebec1. The fact that the realities of the multilingualism of Francophones are sometimes taken into account, and sometimes not, nevertheless strikes us as surprising to say the least.
Let us examine the data presented for the island of Montreal, since it is in this region that immigrants are concentrated. It is from the results of these tables that several observers disseminated the information that less than 50% of Montrealers spoke French at home. It is true that this threshold of 50% marks the imagination. But what is it exactly?
We learn that just over 955,000 people report French as the only language spoken most often at home on the island of Montreal in 2021. However, nearly 175,000 people report speaking more than one language most often at home, including 132,000 who cite French. In our view, it would be inappropriate to exclude them from the French-speaking population on the Island of Montreal.
However, the proportion of the population in this territory declaring French as the language most often spoken at home (single language or equally with others) is 55% and not 48%.
But let’s go even further. You should know that the census questionnaire has undergone some changes over time and that it also allows you to capture all the languages spoken regularly at home. The problem is that the tables currently made available by the ISQ do not allow this. Indeed, the only table focusing on “languages spoken regularly at home” groups together all the people who say they speak more than one language most often, without specifying how many of them declare the French. As suggested by the ISQ website, we used data from the Statistics Canada website2. Result: on the island of Montreal, we no longer find ourselves with less than half of the people who speak French at home, as reported in the media, but rather 65%, or almost two out of three people.
Better understand the realities of Francophone migrants
We have more than once noted that “the tectonic plates of La Francophonie are moving from north to south with Africa becoming the continent-pole”. This continent brings together in 2022, according to the ISQ, six of the main countries of birth of recent immigrants to Quebec, namely Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, but also Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Congo-Kinshasa. However, the reality of this immigration from French-speaking Africa is that it is already originally part of multilingual practices. For example, in Abidjan, which currently has more than 5.6 million city dwellers, French is used as the only language spoken at home by 20% of the inhabitants, while 70% say they use French and an Ivorian language at home. At work, more than 90% of Abidjan residents say they speak French.
This multilingual French-speaking pattern, at home and at work, also characterizes, with some variations, the major cities of other African countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Congo, Gabon, etc. Elsewhere, French is less present, but appears as a partner language, for example with Wolof in Dakar, in Senegal, Arabic and Tamazight in the Maghreb.
By ignoring the multilingualism of French-speaking immigrants, we keep in the blind spot the fact that these linguistic dynamics are complex and evolve slowly and in a variable way.
In other words, for these newcomers, French is likely to be used much more in the public space than at home. It gradually penetrates the private sphere precisely because it is used outside the family sphere.
If we want to promote Francophone immigration to Quebec, it is important to recognize the multilingual nature of these newcomers. It is above all and quite obviously important to recognize this in the statistics produced and in the indicators that are proposed to us.