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rfmcdonaldMore news about Canada's lop-sided bilingualism, this time from the national capital of Ottawa.
This isn't unexpected, considering that the French language has traditionally been the less-spoken and less prestigious of Canada's two major language groups. A couple of years ago at Demography Matters I pointed to researchers who suggested that French held up as well as it did in the Ottawa-Gatineau region because of the strict language legislation applied to Gatineau making French necessary.
The unilingual capital of Quebec appears to be succeeding at promoting bilingualism better than Canada's capital city, reveals a new study released Thursday by the Association for Canadian Studies.
The analysis, based on the latest census figures from Statistics Canada in 2006, found that only 28 per cent of anglophones in the Ottawa region were bilingual, versus about 32 per cent of francophones from the Quebec City region who could speak both official languages.
Ottawa's overall bilingualism rate was slightly higher at 38 per cent, mainly due to the fact that 90 per cent of its francophone residents were bilingual.
But across the river from Ottawa, residents of Gatineau, Que., had a much higher overall rate of bilingualism at 63 per cent.
"I'm kind of surprised that Ottawa would be dragging down Gatineau so much in terms of the level of bilingualism," said Jack Jedwab, the executive director of the association. "I think we're missing opportunities to move forward, and it's unfortunate."
The study, Capital Language, also revealed that residents whose first language is English now make up less than half of the total population in the Ottawa-Gatineau region at 49.3 per cent, compared with 32.2 per cent whose first language is French, and 16.6 per cent whose first language is neither of the two official languages. Anglophones made up 50.3 cent of the region's population in 2001, while allophones — whose first language is neither English nor French — represented only 15.4 per cent at the time. The percentage of francophones was virtually unchanged.
This isn't unexpected, considering that the French language has traditionally been the less-spoken and less prestigious of Canada's two major language groups. A couple of years ago at Demography Matters I pointed to researchers who suggested that French held up as well as it did in the Ottawa-Gatineau region because of the strict language legislation applied to Gatineau making French necessary.
