Language demographics of Quebec

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

English-speaking Quebecers are a large population in the Greater Montreal Area, where they have built a well-established network of educational, social, economic, and cultural institutions.

With the exception of Aboriginal peoples in Quebec (the Inuit, Huron, Mohawks, Iroquois, Abenaki, Montagnais, Cree, Innu, Ojibway etc.

), the majority are products of recent immigration and often come to adopt either English or French as home languages.

(The island and the city were coterminous for a time between the municipal merger of 2002 and the "demerger" which occurred in January 2006.)

Countries from which significant numbers of people immigrate include Haiti, Congo, Lebanon, Morocco, Rwanda, Syria, Algeria, France and Belgium.

Prior to this, Quebec was effectively the sole province required constitutionally to finance the educational needs of its linguistic minority.

Although Quebec currently respects most of the constitutional rights of its anglophone minority, it took a series of court challenges to enforce.

The fourth column shows the difference between the number of speakers according to home language and those who speak it as mother tongue.

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 keep increasing in absolute numbers in spite of assimilation and emigration.

In the early 1960s, with the rise of irreligion, the fertility rate of the Quebecois began declining in a manner consistent with most developed societies, and some in Quebec's francophone majority feared the beginning of a demographic collapse:[19] 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 1960s when, as part of the Quiet Revolution, French Canadians chose to move away from Church domination and towards a stronger identification with state institutions as development instruments for their community.

[20] 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.

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 Quebecers 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[citation needed].

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, especially in Montreal, and to a lesser extent outside of it, notably in Canada's National Capital Region, bordering Ontario, and in the Eastern Townships, particularly Sherbrooke.

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.