Language demographics of Quebec

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This article presents the current language demographics of the Canadian province of Quebec.

Contents

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Overview

Note: The language mentioned refers to the mother tongue (see below), unless otherwise specified.

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Demographic Terms

The complex nature of Quebec's linguistic situation, with individuals who are often bilingual or multilingual, has required the use of multiple terms in order to describe who speaks which languages.

Mother tongue: The first language learned by a person, which may or may not still be used by that individual in adulthood, is a basic measure of a population's language. However, with the high number of mixed francophone-anglophone marriages and the reality of multilingualism in Montreal, this description does not give a true linguistic portrait of Quebec. It is, however, still essential, for example in order to calculate the assimilation rate. Statistics Canada defines mother tongue as the first language learned in childhood and still spoken; it does not presuppose literacy in that or any language.

Home language: This is the language most often spoken at home and is currently preferred to identify francophones, anglophones, and allophones. This descriptor has the advantage of pointing out the current usage of languages. However, it fails to describe the language that is most used at work, which may be different.

Knowledge of official languages: This measure describes which of the two official languages of Canada a person can speak informally. This relies on the person's own evaluation of his/her linguistic competence and can prove misleading.

First official language spoken: This is a composite measure of mother tongue, home language and knowledge of official language.

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Current Demographic Situation

Among the ten provinces of Canada, Quebec is the only one whose majority is francophone. Quebec's francophones account for 19.5% of the Canadian population and 90% of all of Canada's French-speaking population. Quebec is the only province whose francophone population is currently not declining. (See Language in Canada).

The 8% of the Quebec population whose mother tongue is English resides mostly in the Greater Montreal Area, where they have a well-established network of educational, social, economic, and cultural institutions. There is also a historical English-speaking community in the Eastern Townships and the Outaouais region bordering the province of Ontario has a great proportion of anglophones as well.

The remaining 10%, named allophones in Quebec, comprises some 30 different linguistic/ethnic groupings. With the exception of Aboriginal peoples in Quebec (the Inuit, Huron, etc.), the majority are products of 20th century immigration. There are 6.3% Italians, 2.9% Spanish speakers, 2.5% Arabic speakers, 1.7% Chinese, 1.5% Greeks, 1.4% French Creoles, 1.1% Portuguese, 0.9% Vietnamese, 0.8% Polish, and so on.

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Montreal

There are today three distinct territories in the Greater Montreal Area: the metropolitan region itself, Montreal Island, and Montreal City. (The island and the city were coterminous for a time between the municipal merger of 2002 and the "demerger" which occurred in January 2006.)

Quebec allophones account for 9% of the population of Quebec, however 88% of this population reside in the Greater Montreal. Anglophones are also concentrated in the region of Montreal (60%).

Francophones account for 68% of the total population of Greater Montreal, anglophones 12.5% and allophones 18.5%. On the island of Montreal, the francophone majority drops to 52.8% by 2005, a net decline since the 1970s owing to francophone outmigration to more affluent suburbs in Laval and the South Shore. The anglophones account for 21% of the population and the allophones 36%.

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Multilingualism

Between 1971 and 1996, the proportion of native francophones who claimed to know English, too, rose from 26% to 34%. The proportion of native anglophones claiming to know French, too, rose from 37% to 63% percent over the same period. Among allophones claiming a third mother tongue in 1996, 23% also knew French, 19% also knew English, and 48% also knew both. On the whole, the 1971 to 1996 period showed a progression towards better knowledge of French; by 1996, 2.6% of the population (182,480 persons) were trilingual in French, English and Spanish.

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Birth Rate

Quebec's fertility rate is now among the lowest in Canada. At 1.48, it is well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1. This contrasts with the fertility rate before 1960 which was among the highest of the industrialized countries. The fertility rate is a little bit higher among the allophones than among the francophones and the anglophones.

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Immigration

In 2003, Quebec accepted some 37,619 immigrants. A large fraction of these immigrants originated from francophone countries and countries that are former French colonies. Countries from which significant numbers of people immigrate include Haiti, Congo, Lebanon, Morocco, Rwanda, Syria, Algeria, France and Belgium.


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Evolution

Evolution of the language populations in Quebec
Mother Tongue / Year 1951 1961 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 2001
French 82.5%81.2%80.7%80.0%82.4%82.9%82.1%80.9%81.2%
English 13.8%13.3%13.1%12.8%11.0%10.3% 9.6% 8.3% 8.0%
Allophones 3.7% 5.6% 6.2% 7.2% 6.6% 6.8% 8.3%10.7%10.0%
Bilingual - - - - - - - - 0.8%
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Legislation

There are two sets of language laws in Quebec, which overlap and in various areas conflict or compete with each other: the laws passed by the Parliament of Canada and the laws passed by the National Assembly of Quebec.

Since 1982, both parliaments have had to comply with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which constitutionalized a number of fundamental human rights and educational rights of minorities in all provinces (education is a provincial jurisdiction in Canada). Prior to this, Quebec was effectively the sole province required constitutionally to finance the educational needs of its linguistic minority. Ontario and Quebec are both required to finance schools for their principal religious minorities (Roman Catholic in Ontario, Protestant in Quebec), but only in Quebec is the minority almost completely composed of speakers of the minority language. (Quebec also provided English schools for anglophone Roman Catholics.) In 1997, an amendment to the constitution allowed for Quebec to replace its system of denominational school boards with a system of linguistic school boards.

The federal language law and regulations seek to make it possible for all Canadian anglophone and francophone citizens to obtain services in the language of their choice from the federal government. Ottawa promotes the adoption of bilingualism by the population and especially among the employees in the public service.

In contrast, the Quebec language law and regulations try to promote French as the common public language of all Quebecers, while respecting the constitutional rights of its anglophone minority. The government of Quebec promotes the adoption and the use of French to counteract the trend towards the anglicization of the population of Quebec.

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Anglicization and francization

Until the 1960s, the francophone majority of Quebec had only very weak assimilation power and, indeed, did not seek to assimilate non-francophones. Although the quantity of non-francophones adopted French throughout history, the pressure and, indeed, consensus from French-language and English-language institutions was historically towards the anglicization, not francization, of allophones in Quebec. Only a high fertility rate allowed the francophone population to kept increasing in absolute numbers in spite of assimilation and emigration. When, in the early 1960s, the fertility rate of Quebecers began declining in a manner consistent with most Western societies, Quebec's anglophone population -- like elsewhere in Canada -- maintained its relative proportion within the total population and kept on growing in absolute numbers, while Quebec's francophone majority (and the francophone minorities in the rest of Canada) experienced the beginning of a demographic collapse: unlike the anglophone sphere, the francophone sphere was not assimilating allophones, and lower fertility rates were therefore much more determinative.

Quebec's language legislation has tried to address this since the 1970s when, as part of the Quiet Revolution, the francophone majority of French-Canadian origin chose to move away from Church domination and towards a stronger identification with state institutions as development instruments. Instead of repelling non-Catholic immigrants from the French-language public school system and towards the Protestant-run English system, for instance, immigrants would now be encouraged to attend French-language schools. The ultimate quantifiable goal of Quebec's language policy is to establish French as Quebec's common public language, just as English is the common public language in England or Catalan in Catalonia, and thus avoid the decline of the community.

That goal has not been reached as successfully as hoped. After almost 30 years of enforcement of the Charter of the French Language, approximately 49% of allophone immigrants -- including those who arrived before the Charter's adoption in 1977 -- had assimilated to English, down from 71% in 1971, but still more than double anglophones' 21% share of the province's population. This leads some Quebecers, particularly those who support the continued role of French as the province's common public language, to question whether the policy is being implemented successfully. The phenomenon is linked to the linguistic environments which cohabit Montreal -- Quebec's largest city, Canada's second-largest metropolitan area, and home to a number of communities, neighbourhoods, and even municipalities in which English is the de facto common language. The anglophone minority's capacity to assimilate allophones and even francophones has thus compensated for the outmigration of anglophones to other provinces and to other the U.S..

A number of socio-economic factors are thought to be responsible for this reality. They include: the historic role of the English language in Canada and the U.S.; its growing influence in the business and scientific world; the perceived advantages of learning English that result from this prominence and which are particularly appealing to allophones who have yet to make a linguistic commitment; the historic association of English with immigrant Québécois and French with ethnic French-Canadian Québécois, which plays into linguistic and identity politics; and the post-industrial clustering of anglophones into Montreal and away from regional communities. These factors go not only to allophone immigrants' direct linguistic assimilation, but also their indirect assimilation through contact with the private sector. Although the Charter of the French language makes French the official language of the workplace, the socio-economic factors cited here also often make English a requirement for employment, not only in Montreal, but even outside of it, particularly given the growth of free trade and globalized business.

The result is a largely bilingual workforce. Francophones are compelled to learn English to find employment, anglophones are pressured to do the same with French, and allophones are asked to learn both but, in reality, start with one of the two, mostly English but more and more French. In 2001, 29% of Quebec workers declared using English, either solely (193,320), mostly (293,320), equally with French (212,545) or regularly (857,420). The proportion rose to 37% in the Montreal metropolitan area. Indeed, the majority of Montrealers are bilingual and move easily between French and English-speaking social milieux. Outside Montreal, on the other hand, the proportion of anglophones has shrunk to 3% of the population and, except on the Ontario and U.S. borders, struggles to maintain a critical mass to support educational and health institutions -- a reality that only immigrants and francophones usually experience in the other provinces. Unilingual anglophones are however still on the decline because of the higher English-French bilingualism of the community's younger generations.

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Aboriginal Peoples

Aboriginal peoples in Quebec are comprised of a heterogeneous group of about 71,000 individuals, who account for 9% of the total population of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Approximately 60% of those are officially recognized as "Indians" under the federal Indian Act. Nearly half (47%) of this population in Quebec reported an Aboriginal language as mother tongue, the highest proportion of any province. The following table shows the demographic situations of Aboriginal peoples in Quebec:

People Number Linguistic family Region of Quebec Language of use Second language
Abenakis 1,900 Algonquian Mauricie French Abenaki
Algonquins 8,600 Algonquian North East Algonquin French or English
Atikameks 4,900 Algonquian North Atikamek French
Crees 13,000 Algonquian North Cree English
Malecites 570 Algonquian St. Lawrence South shore French English
Micmacs 4,300 Algonquian Gaspésie Micmac French or English
Innus 13,800 Algonquian North Coast Innu French
Naskapis 570 Algonquian North East Naskapis English
Hurons 2,800 Iroquoian near Quebec City French English
Mohawks 13,000 Iroquoian near Montreal English Mohawk
Inuit 8,000 Eskimo-Aleut Arctic Inuktitut English
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See also

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External links

fr:Démographie linguistique du Québec

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