Just "two solitudes?"

[Edward Campbell]

Sorry folks, had a hiccup this morning and may have lost some posts from the wee hours of the morning.

This new thread was also lost ... this is not an exact reconstruction.

This report, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail has social, economical and, above all, political implications for Canada:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/allophones-on-the-cusp-of-outnumbering-francophones-in-canada/article4630383/

Allophones on the cusp of outnumbering francophones in Canada

JOE FRIESEN DEMOGRAPHICS REPORTER
The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Oct. 23 2012

Canada is on the cusp of a historic shift, the day when allophones – those with neither English nor French as a mother tongue – surpass the number of francophones.

The tally is expected to be very close when census numbers on language are released on Wednesday. With the proportion of allophones growing and that of francophones dropping, the trend is clear. The new figures will be seen as a watershed for a country in which so many institutions – particularly official bilingualism – are based on the historic dominance of French and English.

“In terms of mother tongue [the allophones] will almost certainly pass the francophones this time,” said Doug Norris, chief demographer at Environics Analytics and one of the country’s leading census experts. “To me, it’s just a sign of the growing diversity of our population that we’ve seen over a number of years and something that’s only going to continue.”

Although the relegation of French to third place in a Statistics Canada table is a potent symbol of the slow but steady change sweeping through the Canadian population, French is still the mother tongue of more than 21 per cent of Canadians. It’s followed in third place by what the national statistical agency calls Chinese languages, a lumping together of Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka, which amounted to a little more than 3 per cent of all Canadians in the 2006 census. The next largest groups were German and Italian, followed by Punjabi and Spanish, which were all in the range of 1 to 1.5 per cent of the population.

It’s notable that no single immigrant language reached the level of 5 per cent of the population. That’s very different from a country such as the United States, where immigrants come primarily from the Americas and have a language in common. Today, about 12.5 per cent of the U.S. population speaks Spanish at home, according to the American Community Survey.

The trend driving the Canadian demographic shift has been apparent for decades. In 1951, francophones made up 29 per cent of the population. But birth rates declined and, in recent years, immigration has driven most of Canada’s population growth.

Réjean Lachappelle, former director of the demography division at StatsCan, cautions that mother-tongue statistics can paint a misleading portrait. For example, it’s easy to assume that allophones rarely speak English or French when, in fact, nearly half spoke English or French at home in 2006. If two allophones were to meet at random in the street, Canada’s enormous linguistic diversity (about 200 mother tongues) means it’s statistically unlikely they could communicate in any language other than English or French, Mr. Lachappelle said. Still, it’s true that about 3.7 million Canadians, or more than one in 10, spoke another language in their private lives in 2006.

“The story of immigrant languages is that, generally, the first generation has a high retention of mother-tongue language, but it’s much lower in the second generation because they go to French or English school, and by the third generation, it’s very low,” Mr. Lachappelle said.

Allophones who marry into another linguistic group or want to hasten their children’s adaptation to Canada will often speak English or French within the family rather than their native tongue. Others will switch back and forth between an official language and a mother tongue, giving their children the ability to speak two and sometimes three languages.

Phoebe Luo, 27, came to Canada from China in 2008, one of the more than a million immigrants to arrive in Canada since the census of 2006. She and her husband live with her parents, and at home, everyone speaks Mandarin. But Ms. Luo, who is a career and language counsellor at Calgary Immigrant Services, works nearly all day in English, her fourth language. She also volunteered at the local Alliance Française as a way to ease her integration and would like to take more courses in French. But for Ms. Luo and thousands of immigrants in her position, one important decision lies further down the road: What language will she and her husband speak with their children? Her mind isn’t made up, but it’s likely her children will be exposed to more than one language.

“I think for the first few years we’ll speak Mandarin and then they’ll go to Canadian schools and be exposed to the dominant language in society and then we might change,” Ms. Luo said.

First: Allophone is not a linguistic group. French will be Canada's second language for many, many years to come. In 2006 French speakers outnumbered the (number 3) Chinese speakers by 7:1, and to get to that number all, mutually incomprehensible (in spoken form), Chinese languages had to be combined into one.

But, this does point to some important cultural changes. the relative importance of the (broadly and generally) conservative/statist French Canadians is diminishing while that of the equally conservative/Confucian and highly entrepreneurial Asian Canadians is growing.

Second: This will be used as fuel for the fire by French/Quebec separatists, There is no good, positive argument for an independent Quebec - Quebecers are not oppressed, they are not yearning for 'freedom;' but language, the fear of the failure of French in North America, is a significant negative argument that the separatists will use.

Politically: I think the Conservative Party has decided to try to "govern without Quebec." They are leaving Quebec to be fought over by the Liberals, the NDP and Quebec nationalists through either a reborn BQ or a new party - with all the socio-economic problems that appealing to Quebec creates in other parts of Canada. They Conservatives are, instead, focusing their attention on "new Canadians," especially young Asian Canadians - and in 2011 it seems to have worked well for them in the Greater Toronto Area suburbs.

 

[jollyjacktar]

If the "newer" Canadians are going to outnumber those in la belle province (whom are not really keen on the CPC anyhow), it stands to reason that they'd concentrate where they'll get the most bang for the buck.  I do wonder if in the not too far distant future, the one's left behind won't really make a big impact to the CPC (any maybe the rest of us too) in the grand scheme of things.

 

[Ignatius J. Reilly]

I'm surprised that it actually took this long for the number of allophones to gain parity with the francophones.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail is John Ibbitson's take on the issue:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/john-ibbitson-french-will-slowly-struggle-in-canadas-anglophone-sea/article4633798/

French will slowly struggle in Canada’s Anglophone sea

JOHN IBBITSON
Ottawa — The Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Oct. 24 2012

The French fact is steadily eroding in Canada, thanks to immigration and the rise of English as the new global lingua franca.

Going forward, French will increasingly struggle to avoid being drowned in an Anglophone sea, which could fuel separatist demands for a sovereign French nation, while there is still time.

The 2011 census data on language, released by Statistics Canada Wednesday, shows Canada’s other official language struggling to hold its own in a country where being bilingual increasingly means speaking English and something else, with that something else less and less likely to be French.

The decrease over the last five years is small and incremental. Over that time, the proportion of Canadians who have French as their mother tongue has declined from 22.3 per cent of the population to 22.0 per cent.

But the broader trendline is inexorable. In 1981, French was the mother tongue of 25.7 per cent of the Canadian population. Today it is 21.7 per cent. Similarly, over that same period French as the language spoken most often at home has declined from 24.6 per cent of the population to 21 per cent.

Simply put, French is declining from the native language of one-in-four to one-in-five.

The reason, obviously, is immigration.

“Aside from a low fertility rate and incomplete transmission of French as a mother tongue to the children of French-speaking parents, international immigration has the strongest effect on the evolution of French in Canada,” the Statistics Canada analysis of the data observes.

Over the past 30 years, the population of Canada has increased by just under 38 per cent. But the population of those who speak French as a mother tongue grew by only 16 per cent, less than half the rate of the overall increase.

Bilingualism is also acquiring a new definition. Over the past 10 years, the percentage of Canadians who speak both English and French at home has grown from 3.4 per cent of the population to 3.7 per cent.

Those who speak French and another language other than English has grown from 0.7 per cent of the population to 1.3 per cent. These are miniscule figures.

But the percentage of those who speak English and another language other than French has grown from 8.3 per cent of the population to 11.5 per cent. That’s an increase of almost a million people.

For advocates of a bilingual – that is English and French rather than English and Tagalog or French and Mandarin – Canada, the news is not entirely discouraging. In Alberta, for example, the percentage of those who speak French as a mother tongue has gone from 2.1 per cent five years ago to 2.2 per cent today, doubtless due to a general migration of population westward.

But what everyone seems to assume has been borne out by data. Immigrants are slowly but inexorably submerging French as an official language, preferring their native languages or English instead.

The data will fuel the argument of many within the sovereigntist movement in Quebec of the dangers of multiculturalism. For these pure laine, immigrants import both a language and culture that threatens to marginalize French, within Canada at large and within Quebec in particular.

Canadians outside Quebec will, in response, shrug. This country’s major cities outside Quebec have long been linguistic melting pots, with English as the common currency.

In that respect, the French in Quebec are no different from peoples around the world who struggle to preserve their language and culture in the face of the English fact – a global language in a global culture and a global economy.

The French in Quebec simply feel this more acutely. And the 2011 census confirms that they should.