(Quebec) New data illustrate another facet of the decline of the French language in Quebec.
Posted at 8:11 a.m.
An organization linked to Laval University has noted that over a period of barely two years, the use of French to surf the Internet has dropped among Quebec Internet users.
A NETendances survey released Thursday by the Academy of Digital Transformation (ATN) indicates that 64% of Quebec adults use the French language most often to browse the Internet, a drop of 12 percentage points compared to the last survey carried out in 2020, which established this proportion at 76%.
No explanation for the phenomenon has been advanced by the Digital Transformation Academy.
The survey titled Digital portrait of the regions reveals where the decreases were greatest. In the administrative region of Montreal, the proportion of adults using French on the Internet has risen in two years from 61% to 43%. This proportion dropped from 89% to 72% in the Capitale-Nationale region, from 79% to 62% in Montérégie and from 87% to 71% in the Laurentians.
It is in the Montreal region, at 52%, that Internet users are relatively the most numerous to use English most often to browse the Internet.
Business intelligence and marketing research director at ATN, Claire Bourget, says the decline in the use of the French language to browse the internet is in line with the decline in the use of French as a first language. spoken at home that has recently been observed by Statistics Canada.
Moreover, among the few other data from its research, the ATN observed that in Quebec, 7% of adults are not connected to the Internet at home. Of these, 75% are aged 55 and over, 53% have an annual family income of less than $40,000, 53% live alone, 64% are part of the inactive population and 89% live outside of the administrative region of Montreal.
In Quebec as a whole, 83% of adults have a smartphone compared to 66% in 2017. As for the electronic tablet, 56% of adults have one compared to 53% in 2017, while the proportion of holders of Laptop or desktop computer has declined in five years from 82% to 81%.
Finally, the survey reports that 38% of Quebec adults do not know the download speed of their internet connection at home. Some 42% of adults have a connection at home with a download speed corresponding to high-speed Internet.