[lg policy] Canada: Don Macpherson: Census shows language laws working

[Harold Schiffman]

Don Macpherson: Census shows language laws working


By Don Macpherson, The Gazette October 25, 2012



Don Macpherson: Census shows language laws working

Don Macpherson

MONTREAL — As Montreal goes, so goes Quebec, the advocates of
restrictions on linguistic freedom in this province have argued for
nearly 50 years; once the metropolis went English, the hinterland
would surely follow. Defending Montreal against anglicization is still
the end used to justify such means as the “new Bill 101” that the
Marois government is to propose this fall.

Yet there’s little evidence that English is taking over in Montreal,
based on the data on language from the 2011 census made public on
Wednesday. In the Montreal census metropolitan area, Statistics Canada
reported, a majority of the population spoke only French at home. And
while that majority had declined steadily since 2001, it wasn’t
because of gains by English.

For the percentage speaking only English at home also showed a steady
decline over the same period. But the population that reported
speaking French at home with another language other than English had
grown, by nearly 100,000 since the previous census in 2006.
Apparently, more immigrants were speaking at least some French at
home.

So Quebec’s language policies appeared to be working. And if they’re
not broken, they don’t need fixing.But, say the anti-English language
hawks in and around the Parti Québécois, never mind the census
metropolitan area. Forget the French-speaking suburbs of Laval and in
those stretches of the north and south mainlands included in the
census metropolitan area.

Pretend that Montreal Island hasn’t been permanently linked to the
mainland since the Victoria Bridge opened in 1859. And ignore the fact
that the city hall of Montreal is closer, in distance and travel time,
to that of French-speaking Longueuil than to that of Dorval, where the
English-speaking West Island begins.

The language hawks want us to put on blinders that narrow our field of
vision to only Montreal Island. Okay. Let’s play their game, and look
only at the language data for the island from the 2011 census, which
takes a little digging to find on the Statistics Canada website. Sure
enough, we see that in the Montreal census division, which is what
Statistics Canada calls the island, people who reported speaking
French most often at home were clinging to a bare majority last year.

And — gasp! — people who gave French as their only mother tongue were
in the minority, at 47 per cent. So the English must be taking over
Montreal, right? That’s what the language hawks want you to infer.
But, in fact, people with French as their only mother tongue still
comfortably outnumbered those with only English by nearly three to
one.

The second-largest group on Montreal Island was the “non-official
language” group, which outnumbered the English by nearly two to one.
Those are the people who are required to send their children to French
school and who, as we saw above, increasingly tend to speak French at
home. And while maybe only a bare majority of people who lived on the
island spoke French most often at home, an overwhelming majority — 86
per cent! — claimed to know French well enough to be able to conduct a
conversation in that language.

No doubt some of the latter exaggerated their fluency in French. But
even this suggests at least that non-francophone Montrealers value the
ability to speak French. There were still more than 200,000 people
living on Montreal Island who admitted to knowing English only, and
nearly 50,000 more who said they knew neither French nor English. But
there were more than twice as many as that — more than one-quarter of
the population, and a majority of those with French as their mother
tongue — who said they knew only French.

That’s in a Montreal that’s being “anglicized.”

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Macpherson+Census+shows+language+laws+working/7441016/story.html#ixzz2APom1JZX


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