What if French isn’t actually dying in Quebec?
The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) released a study earlier this month on the state of the French language in Quebec and, as per normal, many headlines focused on potentially negative findings. The notion that French is mortally imperilled in Quebec, certainly in the medium and long term, has baked itself firmly into the country’s politics and journalism.
“Exclusive use of French at work declines in Quebec: OQLF study,” read one headline.
“Montrealers less likely to use French in the workplace (than other Quebecers),” said another.
And “More than 14.4 per cent of Quebecers now order their meals (for delivery) in English.”
We also got some shocking positive headlines, however, reflecting the OQLF study’s main finding — to wit, “The use of French in public life is stable in Quebec.”
That’s right: Near as the OQLF can tell, the state of French in Quebec isn’t materially different than it was 10 or 20 years ago. This is somewhat akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change casually releasing a new report showing we don’t have all that much to worry about, and many decades to adjust and adapt. It would require some serious rethinking of priorities and policy.
In 2022, the OQLF found, the number of Quebecers using only French most often in public was 79 per cent — a change of zero per cent since 2007. The number using only English most often actually shrank slightly, from 11 per cent in 2007 to eight per cent in 2022.
And if you include people who speak English and French equally often in public life — a fair few Montrealers and people in the Outaouais region — the number speaking French on a day-to-day basis rises to 92 per cent, up from 90 per cent in 2007.
But I hear you ask: What of Montrealers specifically? Surely the 1,001 anecdotal tales of French dying in the metropolis would be borne out. All those dreaded bonjours-hi! That time at Dairy Queen, or was it Burger King, when whatshisface from the radio couldn’t order in French!
On the Island of Montreal, between 2016 and 2022, the OQLF found the proportion of people using French most often and exclusively in public actually grew slightly, from 58 per cent to 60 per cent. (A tie, basically, as are many of these “differences.”) The proportion who speak French and English equally and most often rose significantly, from 17 per cent to 22 per cent.
And those bilingual daily lives seem to have replaced, in the main, unilingual English daily lives: “The proportion (on the Island of Montreal) who spoke English most often (and exclusively) diminished from 24 per cent to 17 per cent,” the OQLF found — a remarkable drop.
OK, I hear you ask, but what of young people? Surely it’s the 18-to-34s, and their kids, who will finally turn Quebec into Louisiana. (Louisianisation is the supposed threat of Quebec — where per the 2021 Census 94 per cent claim knowledge of French — turning into Louisiana, where per the 2022 U.S. Census only 2.3 per cent speak any Indo-european language other than Spanish. It’s unhinged.)
Well, there’s more good news here. At 74 per cent, the 18-to-34s are indeed the least likely cohort to use French exclusively in public. (It’s 84 per cent among those 70 and older.) But if you add in those who speak English and French equally and most often, it’s 89 per cent of 18-to-34s — within a point or two of their elders.
This is only terrible news if (a) you’re determined to find terrible news and (b) you consider bilingualism a threat to French, which most Quebecers (especially younger ones) quite rightly do not. It’s an elite opinion.
The reaction among nationalist pundits, who generally subscribe enthusiastically to (a) and (b), was predictable. It’s not true. It can’t be true. The methodology is flawed. It’s an outlier. The response rate was too low. The data are at least two years old, and Trudeauvian mass immigration has skewed the numbers since then.
Influential commentator and former Parti Québécois leader Jean-françois Lisée argued the OQLF should have been comparing the current state of play to its report from way back in 1997, to give readers a better long-term picture. “The decline would (then) have been obvious, with French as the language of public use having fallen from 87 per cent in 1997 to 79 per cent in 2022,” Lisée wrote in Le Devoir.
But again, that only really works if you consider English-french bilingualism a threat to French. The number of Quebecers the OQLF found to speak French most often or equally often as English was 92 per cent, not 79 per cent. The 2022 numbers aren’t strictly comparable to the 1997 ones, but the latter showed 87 per cent spoke “almost exclusively” or “above all” French in public.
If 92 per cent now speak French exclusively or just as often as English, that sure looks (at worst) like status quo.
The Montreal Gazette has quite rightly called for the OQLF study to prompt a “reality check” in Quebec City and Ottawa with respect to further restrictions on the English language in Quebec. It almost certainly won’t. Quebec’s probable next PQ government, led by Paul St-pierre Plamondon, promises only further restrictions. And every party in the House of Commons is too invested in the myth of dying French.
But hope springs eternal — and all the more so, perhaps, when it comes from a body like the OQLF. When the authors of Pastagate are capable of reporting ideologically confounding data points, what’s everyone else’s excuse?