The decline of official language minorities in Quebec and English Canada

"This paper considers the evolution of French outside of Quebec and the English in Quebec.... The total historical set of national data on ethnicity, mother tongue, knowledge of official languages and home language [is first presented]. The 120 year stability showing French at around 30 percent of the national total is a function of compensating factors including high French fertility and high English immigration. During the 1960s both of these demographic supports disappeared and thus mobility across linguistic lines has become a particularly sensitive issue. "The picture with regard to French outside of Quebec has changed rather radically in the last thirty-five years. For instance, there was one French child to every nine in 1941 and one to every twenty-one children in 1976. While the English of Quebec were once represented in various parts of the province, their strength is now largely limited to the Montreal metropolitan area which includes 76 percent of the English mother tongue group. Outside of Montreal, the English amounted to 7.9 percent of Quebec's population in 1941 and 5.6 percent in 1976. The paper concludes with a discussion of the social factors that underlie these trends and their relevance to the models of institutional and territorial bilingualism." (summary in FRE)