FRENCH IN QUEBEC*

Philippe Barbaud
Université du Québec à Montréal

   Introduction in backdrop
	When in 1774, that is 15 years after the surrender of Quebec to the troops of General Wolfe, the King of the British Empire George III signed the Quebec Act to restore the «coutume de Paris » (ancestor of the present civil right) in the province of Quebec, he implicitly consecrated, at the same time, the legal recognition of the French language in this part of North America.  It was a decision fraught with consequences, as we know, but that was nevertheless dictated by the pressing necessity to avoid a possible uprising from the French Canadians and their Amerindian allies(1).  In fact, the French Canadians were living, on the one hand, with the obsessive fear of being deported just as were their French fellows from Acadia between 1755 and 1763, an « ethnic purification » as we say today that affected 11,000 Acadians out of the 12,000 settled in this other colony of France.  The eventuality of an uprising turned out more fearsome because it combined, on the other hand, with the threat of an invasion of the former French possessions by the rebel troops of the United States, of which the Independence would be unilaterally proclaimed in 1776(2).  The same reasons pushed George III to sign the Constitutional Act in 1791, granting his parliament to Lower Canada (which then momentarily lost its name and statute of province).  It was another decision fraught with consequences because to make sure of the allegiance of his French subjects needed to maintain his commercial hold north of the 45th parallel, he granted them a « state of right » at the origin of one of the oldest parliamentary democracies of modern times.  What is agreed to be called the « fait français » in North America became at the same time a territorial enclave in which the French language would lie fallow for a long time.

1.1   Language and power

This brief incursion into the ancient history of Quebec shows that the French language was associated, from the outset of the Conquest, to the exercise of a political power collectively assumed by a society already greatly conscious of its distinctivity(3).  It is then in this particular light of a convergence of the language and the exercise of power that it is proper to describe the linguistic situation of Quebec, because such a viewpoint allows to deal with the universal phenomenon of the « languages in contact » from the most suitable angle to the particular, indeed exclusive situation of this linguistic enclave in North America(4).

The particularity of Quebec goes beyond a simple « contact » between common languages or dialects in the general context of movements of populations, cross-border linguistic exchanges or historical cohabitation.  It illustrates a « shock of the languages » (Bouthillier & Meynaud, 1972) indeed a « war of the languages » (Calvet, 1987 ; Leclerc, 1989), confronting two dominant and imperialist languages according to the era.  Right from the institution of the English system of government, the French language is perceived by the French Canadians as the spearhead of a ceaseless fight, an instrument of political claims aiming at obtaining social justice and material equality for the « people », in view of the gap widening in relation to the « English people » whose population is in constant growth.  But except for some confrontations sometimes insurgent, such as the « Révolte des Patriotes » in 1837 ; the conscription in 1942 ; the riots in Saint-Léonard in September 1969 and the terrorism of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) in the 70s, the growing antagonism that marks the relations between French and English people in Canada is characterized by a « remarkable degree of non-violence » (Lemco, 1992).

It is only at the beginning of the 60s, period that initiated an accelerated movement of modernization (the so-called « quiet revolution »), that the French Canadians of Quebec learned to articulate their claims in a context of coherent political action, notably by defining themselves collectively in relation to the ideology of bilingualism and multiculturalism implanted by the federal government of Ottawa, under the personal aegis of the Prime Minister at the time, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.  This new federal venture(5) has certainly been kicked-off in 1963 with the creation, by the government of Lester B. Pearson, of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (known as Laurendeau-Dunton Commission), whose works revealed to the Canadian public opinion the real importance of the age-old inferiority of the francophones in their own country.  The government of the province of Quebec also took an initiative with the creation in 1968 of the Commission d’enquête sur la situation linguistique de la langue française et sur les droits linguistiques au Québec (known as Commission Gendron).  Besides the important linguistic laws that resulted from recommendations born of these two commissions, several facts were widely publicized by the media during the 60s and 70s.

1.2   Demographic minorization

For the first time indeed, Canadians of all origins were affected by the implacable tyranny of statistics, these of linguistic demography, provincial economy, state education, immigration, natality, etc.  This assessed knowledge would help to define gradually the new social consciousness of the Canadian and Quebec population.  From the interpretation of the statistics came out a new vocabulary that would mould ideas and attitudes.  The French Canadians then became « Quebecers », easily confused with « francophones ».  The French « people » of Canada mentioned in the British North America Act became a minority speaking one of the two official languages to end up, today, as a « community » among others in multiethnic and multicultural Canada.  But above all French Canadians, at that time, abruptly noted not only the minorization phenomenon of their ethnic group but also its impact on the possible loss of political power at the federal level by means of their parliamentary representation in the House of Commons and especially in the Supreme Court.  While in 1867, the year the Canadian Confederation was born, the population of Quebec reached the proportion of 33% of that of Canada (after being 36,5% in 1851) and that the deputation of the province amounted to 65 elected members in 181, a proportion of 36%, these two figures never stopped to decrease regularly ever since.  In the 1962 elections, the population of Quebec was only 28,8% of the Canadian population and the deputation in the Commons, 80% francophone, was reduced to 75 elected members in 259 for Canada on the whole, which is not even 29% of the deputies in the House of Commons.  Today, the francophone population of Quebec, according to the home language, is only 21% of the Canadian population but its deputation, 80% francophone, still counts 84 deputies in a total of 294, a proportion almost identical to that of 1962(6).  Quite obviously, such a distorsion reveals a political overdeputation.  George Matthews (1994 : 156), an economist, formulates the stakes of this demographic logic in these words :

« By the time francophones in Quebec will represent less than 20% of the Canadian population (instead of 22% in 1981), voices will probably raise to claim a revision of the bilingualism policy in the federal public and parapublic service ».

In other words, the notion of equality of languages conveyed by an officially bilingual Canada in the accord of nations is doomed to disappear, which will inevitably lead to a fundamental redefinition of this country.

1.3   French language and prosperity in the 60s

Moreover, francophone Quebecers abruptly learned, as soon as 1967, to establish a negative relation between their language and the economic prosperity of their society.  They were able, at that time, to measure their representation in the economy of Quebec and Canada.  Just as revealed the report of the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, it is deteriorating since 1930.  The jobs best positioned on the occupation scale are massively held by anglophones and Jews (verbatim, Book III, p. 36).  But it is in Montreal and in Quebec in general that the gap between anglophones and francophones is the most striking : 8 points of difference in favour of anglophones on the national scale, 16 on that of Quebec and 18 on that of Montreal (Book III, p. 44).  In this city, 86% of anglophones earning more than 5,000 dollars per year are unilingual (Book III, p. 514).

The incomes of the two speech « communities » naturally reflects this disparity.  In Canada, the average income of a French Canadian is 20% inferior to the average income in the provinces (Book III, p. 19).  In Quebec, the average income of a francophone is 35% inferior to that of an anglophone.  As if it was not humiliating enough, francophones learn that in 1961 they were ranked next to last on the salary scale according to the ethnic group, just before Italians who ranked 9th, the last rung.  Ten years later, in 1970, they regressed one rung, holding the last rung (Vaillancourt, 1985, p. 131).  Then the public opinion is especccially struck in learning that the anglophones’ income in Quebec is 40% superior to the average in Quebec, while it is 10% superior to the average in the other provinces (Book III, p. 17).  According to Wardhaugh (1983 : 79), the income base was distributed this way between francophones and anglophones in 1961 :

1. The unilingual anglophone of British origin : 6,049 dollars ;
2. The bilingual anglophone : 5,929 dollars ;
3. The unilingual anglophone of French ethnic origin : 5,775 dollars ;
4. The bilingual francophone : 4,523 dollars ;
5. The unilingual francophone of French ethnic origin : 3,107 dollars ;
6. The unilingual francophone of British origin : 2,783 dollars.

As Jean-Claude Corbeil writes (1980 : 44), Quebec appears from this point of view « as a privileged place for anglophones ; we then understand one of the deep reasons of their hostility with regard to linguistic laws in Quebec ».

1.4   French language and immigration in the 60s

The third most striking aspect of the linguistic situation at that time was unquestionably the assessment of immigration.  For the first time, Quebecers were confronted with a specific knowledge of the universal phenomenon of linguistic assimilation, of theirs and others’, particularly that of New-Canadians or « allophones » as they were henceforth to be called.  They were able to understand, at that point, the real importance of the difference existing between the home language at home and the mother tongue declared(7).  They were also able to understand to what extent the primary and secondary education is decisive in the process of linguistic minorization.

Thus, from 1951 to 1961, the international net migration(8) assessed to nearly 900,000 new Canadians.  Marc Termotte, a demographer, evaluated to 3,000 the average number of entries in Quebec since 1951, but considering the weak retention rate of the province, it is an annual average of 21,000 assessed immigrants that must be considered according to a hypothesis he describes as pessimist, at least for the period 1951 to 1977, cf Termotte (1980 : 22).  On the upgraded basis of these 546,000 New-Quebecers in a quarter of a century, the part of the French language suddenly turned out to be derisory.  A report published in January 1967, titled Quand la majorité n’assimile pas, stemming from the Comité interministériel sur l’enseignement des langues aux Néo-Canadiens, cf Bouthillier & Meynaud (1972) shows that barely between 60,000 and 65,000 of these New-Quebecers were francophones.  The immigrants of British or American origin represented all on their own 35% of the left 480,000.

But where the situation was on the verge of becoming a tragedy was on the question of the immigrants’ academic option.  The report shows that more than 90% of all new Canadian children attend English school.  What is more, the trend goes contrary to what it has already been.  While between 1931 and 1937 the distribution of new Canadian pupils was almost equal in each linguistic sector (52,3% for the French sector and 47,7% for the English sector), the regression of the French sector remained constant ever since in favour of the English sector, falling to 33,5% in 1947-48 and to 25,3% in 1962-63.  About this generation of pupils, the committee concludes in saying that « (...) they are the ones who will preserve the anglophone character of Montreal », cf Bouthillier & Meynaud (1972 : 701).

Finally, it is also towards the end of the 50s that the Italian immigrant community, the most important non-anglophone group in number, began to change its attitude towards its welcoming milieu.  In 1961, there were still 61,488 (61%) Italians speaking French in Montreal and only 49,449 speaking English, while 12,409 of them stated that French was their mother tongue against 5,650 for English.  But while in 1951-52 they were sending almost half of their children (49%) in the French schools of the Commission des écoles catholiques de Montréal, this proportion fell to 12% in 1967-68.

It is true that the indifference of the population and the negligence of those in power in Quebec were greatly responsible for the weak attraction the French Canadian milieu exercised on the allophones of Montreal at that time.  Moreover, we cannot invoke the confessionnality of the school boards, assured by the Canadian Constitution, to explain the decline of the French school network in comparison with certain other ethnic communities (Polish, Ukranian, Hungarian, etc.) traditionally catholic.  Nevertheless international immigration was perceived as a worrying threat for the survival of French language, especially in Montreal where it was massively concentrated.

1.5   A mutilated metropolis

It is also at that time and simultaneously with the important works of the two commissions of inquiry aforesaid that a real popular consciousness of the quality of spoken and written French develops on this side of the Atlantic.  The fight against anglicisms led by a handful of well-read people in the century that followed the confederative pact moved on virgin grounds : labelling of consumer goods, commercial display, advertising and toponymy.  Montreal, which prided itself on being the second French city in the world, suddenly revealed itself ugly and depreciated from the outside.  Its commercial streets had lost any sign of « French look  ».  55% anglophone in 1851(9), the province’s metropolis long perpetuated (until 1974 in fact) this domination of the English language in an environment traditionally assimilated to the business world, in spite of the irresistible growth of its French population ever since.  In the census of 1971, Montreal was 67% francophone(10) but its demographic decline began at the same time as the migration of its anglophone city dwellers in other provinces and the exodus of its francophone city dwellers in the suburbs.

1.6   An alienated speech

To conclude this quick survey of a past synonym of « baby boom », we can say that the Canadian public opinion was then considerably alerted to the problem of national unity, consequence of an economic cleavage in a modern society superposed on an old linguistic dispute.  But in Quebec, opinion leaders are more preoccupated by the problem of equality than by that of unity.  « Equality or sovereignty » was the slogan of the election campaign led by Daniel Johnson senior, elected Prime Minister in 1967.  Thus the research of equality presupposes the recognition of the identity of each partner.  That is how a good part of the intellectual and artistic circles launched forth into the quest of the Quebec identity, sometimes with virulence.  Prompted by a double reflex, that of « colonized » by the British crown and that of « abandoned » by France, the shameful motherland, a certain elite newly educated undertook its task of popular education by searching the Quebec identity through the absolute reject of the purely French literary and linguistic heritage and the apology of the « homme rapaillé » (Gaston Miron), that is the new Franco-Quebecer longing to become «maître chez lui ».

Symbol of this new identity, joual(11) brought the adherence of a new generation of writers and well-read people, propelled on the forums of schools, colleges and universities.  That is how, nowadays, the vernacular and alienated speech of the working proletariat still climbs the rungs of respectability in the linguistic consciousness of a majority of francophone Quebecers.  The only merit of the controversy on joual was to bring to light the essential difference between the oral code and the cultivated written code within a language to the extent we can mention a state of « diglossia », according to Ferguson (1959)(12).

But facing the stakes of the linguistic norm in the middle 70s, this movement fell back in front of a speech much more homogeneous and less marked in society.  The advent of the Quebec speech of today, which we will discuss in the end of this article, is especially the result of the sudden growth of the public service between 1965 and 1980 and the setting up of social infrastructures : education networks, hospitals and courts of justice, state-owned companies, etc.  According to Daoust and Maurais (1987 : 29), the Prime Minister of Quebec, Mr Robert Bourassa, gave out a directive to his state employees on the use of the French language as soon as he came to power in 1970.  From 25,000 in 1959, the number of permanent state employees went to 53,800 in 1969 and to 62,500 in 1979 (Ambroise, 1986 : 158)(13).  95% francophone, the Quebec state service acted as a linguistic regulator, according to Corbeil (1983 : 283), by diffusing a speech of fairly educated people and by constantly striving for the contact of written French intended for the public.

2.   STATE INTERVENTIONISM

What about the situation of the French language in Quebec nowadays?  To answer this question first requires to assess the legal context in which the evolution of the linguistic situation(14) took place.  In a society of rights, it is in the law that the convergence of power and language finds its most accomplished expression.  The present vitality of the French language in Quebec could not be attributed to the only will of the francophones concentrated on the territory of this province ; it results from the combination of forces issued by both exterior sources, such as anglo-Caanadian or foreign, and interior sources.  It is in the name of the country’unity that the federal government will take its intiatives while it is in the name of  the two founder nations’equality that the government of Quebec will take its own.  In both cases, we can witness the setting up of what we can call an antinomic « reason of State ».  These two reasons of State will justify the interventionist measures taken on the two government levels, which will lead to a mix-up of federal and provincial laws inspired by the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada.

2.1   Creation of the Office de la langue française du Québec

The first law to join politics and linguistics was that of the government of Quebec that created the first Office de la langue française in 1961.  Expression of a political will to protect and standardize a language in jeopardy, this brand new government organization dedicated itself to the « enrichment » and the « correction » of the spoken and written language, what it did in favouring a « voluntarist » and noninterventionist approach as regards the quality of the language, particularly during the debate on joual (Maurais, 1987).  For the first time in its history, Quebec acknowledged its social responsibility in the matter of French, but the question of linguistic norm remained unsolved.  The following decades will be marked by an « internal » linguistic instability engendered by a more or less characterized situation of diglossia (Chantefort, 1976 ; Saint-Pierre, 1976).

2.2   The Official Languages Act

The following initiative will come from the federal government.  It is July 9th 1969 that the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau passes the Official Languages Act of Canada.  Besides instituting the position of Commissioner of Official Languages, entrusted to the extraordinary bilingual speaker Keith Spicer with the mandate of ensuring the right representation of French and English in the whole state machinery,  this law will act as a powerful lever for the promotion of French especially more in Quebec than in the other provinces.  But in a more significant way, it contributed to propel the image of Canada as an officially bilingual country on the international scene.  In fact, the second article of this fundamental law stipulates that « the statute, rights and privileges of English and French languages are equal ».  Often trapped by the ideal of linguistic equality conveyed by its image,  Canada will have some difficulty in assuming the logic of it in diplomacy and other fields of international negotiation (World Bank,WHO, GATT, FTA, ALENA, etc.) which represents a permanent potential of situations of conflict ; the episodes of the Ottawa-Paris-Quebec triangle on the one hand and the Summits of French-speaking communities on the other hand illustrate it eloquently.

2.3   Linguistic legislation on a crisis background : Act 63

The kick-off of the first legislation that the government of Quebec will be forced to pass at that time to resolve a crisis that led to violent confrontations between francophones and italophones (allied to anglophones) will come from the school circles.  The impasse reached by the Commission scolaire de Saint-Léonard, a suburbs east of Montreal with a strong Italian concentration, illustrates the depth of the deterioration of the linguistic balance of power that had rapidly taken a firm hold there between 1960 and 1967.  A regulation previously passed and aiming at creating bilingual primary schools for the allophone population was rejected by a weak majority of commissioners anxious to institute French unilingualism at this level.  In fact, the primary level bilingual classes turned out to be an active source of assimilation to English, because almost 70% of immigrant children were registered in English classes.  The virulence of the riots surprised everybody.  The freedom of choosing a language of education was at the heart of the debate.  The government led by Jean-Jacques Bertrand at that time believed he could resolve the conflict by voting Act 63, known as Loi pour promouvoir la langue française au Québec.  This law consecrated the common scheme of the registration in French schools while allowing the access to English schools to anybody who makes a request.  Such an ambiguity could not help to be perceived badly by francophones, unlike allophones and anglophones.  Not only did it give the green light to the massive angliczation of immigrants but it also gave it to francophones anxious of seeing their children become perfect bilinguals.  According to Claude Saint-Germain (1980  21), « in 1971-72, about 27,600 francophone pupils studied in English, while 18,200  anglophones studied in French, that is a deficit of 9,400 pupils for francophones.  From 2% that year in relation to the total number of pupils of primary and secondary levels (1,378,300 pupils), this proportion did not stop to increase, passing from 1,6% in 1969-70 to the culmination of 2,5% in 1974-75.  From then on a conflictual balance of power built up in the matter of language of education, aggravated by the acceleration of anglophone emigration and the concentration of certain ethnic minorities in several neighbourhoods of Greater Montreal.

2.4   Advent of a double market : commercial bilingualism

The following episode comes from the federal government and is systematically underestimated by the experts in what concerns French as a « national value » of Canada.  It is the coming into effect, in 1974, of the Loi sur l’emballage et l’étiquetage des produits de consommation and the rules related to it.  Until then considered as a market related to that of the United States, Canada becomes de facto a territory of exportation in North America for multinationals used to operate without showing concern about the cultural characteristics of their various markets (Barbaud, 1994a).  From now on, English-French bilingualism is an economic reality to be reckoned with.  The francophone consumer now has rights and intends to have them respected.  The Commissioner of Official Languages will have a hard job during those years in applying the law in its entirety(15).  It goes without saying that there is still a potential of confrontation insofar as the international jurisprudence tends to consider linguistic laws as economic obstacles to the free movement of goods (Woehrling, 1993).  The famous « cultural exception » won by a hard-fought struggle during the ALENA and the GATT’s Uruguay Round negotiations shows how it is difficult to admit a difference between a measure of protection on the linguistic plane and a protectionist measure on the commercial plane (Barbaud, 1994b).

2.5   Act 22 or Loi sur la langue officielle

It is during that year that the government of Quebec, led by Robert Bourassa at that time, passes this law in the context of the recommendations of the Commission Gendron.  The mobilization of Quebecers of all origins for the linguistic question has reached a point of extreme tension, so that it becomes necessary to legislate in a significative way in all fields where the French language plays its future.  That is why Act 22 will have more scope than everything we could have imagined in the few previous years.  French is then claimed official language of the province and its use is prescribed in five major sectors that define its fields of application : the public services, the companies and professions, the working world, the business world and education.  But this last point became afterwards its Achille’s heel because of many dispensations the law granted, notably by means of a clause of « sufficient knowledge » of English language established by means of ministerial « tests ».  Not only did these dispositions turn out unenforceable in practice but did they displease the majority of francophones longing to see immigrant children register massively in French schools.  However a great leap had been taken forward especially in the matter of thelanguage of work.  One of the merits of this law was certainly to reinforce the public opinion in the idea that it was legitimate and possible, in this part of North America, to earn one’s living in French.  In short, the law says that business could also be run in this language.  Then, the economic prosperity of a society downgraded until then and the French language praised to the top of a law were definitively linked.  However the challenge consisted in modifying in depth the attitudes and habits acquired in a field assimilated to the English language, the language of business, since 200 years.

2.6   The French Language Charter or Bill 101

The coming to power of René Lévesque’s sovereignist Party in November 1976 will have the effect of a thunderbolt in the Canadian sky.  Taking up the structure of Act 22, Bill 101 or French Language Charter was passed in August 1977 and rapidly became the emblem -and even a sacred text (Julius Grey, 1995) in some people’s eyes- of the nationalist movement from then to today.  This law, a real piece of linguistic planning, is characterized by its exhaustive aspect and its measures often judged as coercive(16).  In the matter of language of education, it tolls the knell of free choice.  From then on, the only children whose father or mother kept up with th major part of their primary class in English in Quebec have access to English schools.  This disposition was given the name « Quebec clause », which will be demolished a few years later by the « Canada clause ».  Furthermore, bilingualism is recognized in the matter of public communication for towns in Quebec whose population includes at least 50% of anglophones.

But it is especially in the matter of language of work that Bill 101 impresses the most.  Its impact will be felt in all companies of 50 employees and more thanks to a train of measures aiming at setting in motion a vast process of francization.  Those affect both internal communications between management and staff and hiring or current operations.  Instructions, use and service manuals, manipulation instructions, identification of machinery parts, everything unilingual English must have its French equivalent well visible.  All those measures are accompanied with a system of implanting and follow-up.  The Office de la langue française is given the responsibility of looking after the integral application of Bill 101, backed up in this by a Commission de surveillance endowed with a power of inquiry and francization committees implanted in every company(17).  This commission is not only given the task of granting companies a francization certificate but also of adjusting the French language as regards terminology.  The Commission de toponymie, as for it, is in charge of planning the territory in the matter of places names.  Finally, a Commission d’appel receives complaints from companies that are in litigation with the Office de la langue française.  Let’s add that Bill 101 renews the Conseil de la langue française in its mandate, a consultative organization in charge of studying the linguistic situation scientifically and of providing the Minister responsible of the Charter with advices.  

Since it was passed and enforced, this law got talked about a lot, both in and outside of Canada.  People blamed it for provoking an important « exodus » of anglophone Quebecers in the years that followed.  Maurais (1987 : 395) reports that 131,530 anglophones (including 61% unilinguals) left Quebec between 1976 and 1981(18).  Nevertheless, between 1971 and 1976, that is to say before Bill 101 was passed, 94,000 anglophones had done the same (Baillargeon, 1983).  Moreover Statistics Canada (1994 : 60) specifies : « During the 25 years previous to the census of 1991, about 450,000 anglophones left Quebec for other provinces ».  Therefore, the migration of anglophones is not a new phenomenon, as notes R. Joy (1967).  This author anticipates that this movement « is more likely to accelerate if French increases its power and prestige ».  In conclusion, the role of identity of Bill 101 was considerable because this law brought to light the nationalism, until then diffuse, of francophone Quebecers of all political leanings. This law then became the guardian of the language while, language had always been considered as the « guardian of the faith », to take up the title of a speech made by Henri Bourassa on November 20th 1918.

2.7   The Constitutional Act of 1982 : the Canada clause

The 1980 referendum ended in a bitter failure for the supporters of independence but since the Prime Minister Trudeau committed himself to renewing the Canadian Constitution, Quebecers re-elected the government of René Lévesque in 1981 with a significant majority.  At the close of negotiations involving all the provincial governments, the federal government as well as the native representatives, the Canadian government carried on regardless the opposition of Quebec and Natives and passed the Constitutional Act in 1982 in accordance with which Canada repatriated its constitution, until then under the jurisdiction of the British parliament.  This act was considered by a majority of francophone Quebecers as an act of betrayal.

What confers to this political decision an important linguistic dimension is the fact that the Constitutional Act is henceforth accompanied with the Charte canadienne des droits et libertés whose articles 16 to 22 reiterate the declaration to the effect that French and English are the two official languages in Canada.  Moreover article 23 expressly stipulates that all Canadian citizens whose mother tongue is French or English or who received their primary education in one of these two languages have the right to have all their children educated, at the primary and secondary levels, in the same language(19).  That is what we call « Canada clause ».  On this subject, Michel Plourde (1988 : 102), a former president of the Office de la langue française, gives the following opinion, corroborated by Maurais (1987 : 371) :

« The judges of the Supreme Court recognized that article 23 of the Constitutional Act of 1982 had been expressly composed by the federal legislator in order to counter the arrangements of Quebec’s Bill 101 relating to the language of education.  At the same time, they recognized that Quebec, by legislating in the matter of language, exercised its legitimate right.  It was therefore asserting clearly that this article of the Canadian Constitution, to which Quebec had not adhered, was specifically planned to invalidate afterwards a chapter of Bill 101 which, for seven years, had been legal and legitimate.  Then the legal aspect went prevailing over the legitimate aspect ».

The new constitution considerably modified the impact of Bill 101, as prove several court sentences passed afterwards.  Quebec, following the example of Manitoba, was forced to legislate to conform with the decisions of the highest court of the country.  First came Bill 57, passed in 1983 by the National Assembly of Quebec, that restored institutional bilingualism in public and parapublic organizations.  Then Bill 142 was passed in December 1986 to complete Bill 101 by assuring the anglophone minority social and health services in their language.  In 1988, Bill 178, thanks to an escape or « clause nonobstant », restored bilingual commercial display in businesses of less than 50 employees in response to a judgement of the Supreme Court wanting that the free choice of the language used in display be covered by the individual right of free expression assured by the Canadian Constitution.  Finally, Bill 86, passed in 1993, relaxes the preceeding one to put an end to five years of exceptional arrangements by allowing bilingualism in commercial display provided that French is predominant.  Since then, some people suggest that linguistic peace is settled in Quebec and that French language is in safety there.  What exactly is the situation?

3   VITALITY AND PRECARIOUSNESS OF FRENCH LANGUAGE IN QUEBEC

The vitality of a language depends on the number of people who actually speak it and on its real use in society.  An useless language becomes one language too many.  It is work that mainly confers to a language its real use in a production society.  At a time when the unemployment rate oscillates around an endemic 11% of the working population in the province of Quebec and when, according to the Ministry of Sécurité du revenu the poverty rate is the highest in the whole country(20), the unproductive labour force is more likely to emigrate elsewhere.  In fact, history shows that French-speaking Quebecers did not hesitate to swap the faith to their language for more prosperity in English.  Between 1840 and 1930, the year the United states decided to close their frontiers, more than 1,2 million francophones ran away from poverty (Lavoie, 1973), the poverty of Lower Canada first, then that of Eastern Canada and finally that of the « Dominion of Canada » created by the British North America Act, to settle south of the 45th parallel (and not in the Prairies of Western Canada, as mentions R. J. Joy), mainly in the manufacturing towns of New England ; this represents an annual average of 5 to 10% of the total population of Quebec(21).  At the dawn of the third millennium, could economic laws decimate the French population of Quebec anew ?

3.1   Assimilation and linguistic transfers

The emigration of the francophones of Quebec might be the next threat hovering over the future of French considering the mediocre economic situation that affects more specifically this province since the beginning of the 80s.  Nevertheless, at the present time, assimilation is more dreadful than emigration.  Lifelong companion of francophones in America, linguistic assimilation continues its work in accordance with its universal mechanics.  We know that the best measure of assimilation is provided by the rate of linguistic transfers over a voting period.  This rate is based on the differential between a population speaking the mother tongue and a population speaking the home language.  The home language is defined as the language most spoken at home.  From the French language’s point of view, assimilation is called anglicization.  This happens when the levels of the home language of the francophone population become fewer than that of the French mother tongue.  Francization happens when the levels of the home language of the francophone population increase by taking advantage of the losses recorded among other populations.

3.1.1   Progress does not engender safety

Generally speaking, the census of 1991 shows that during the last 40 years, the population of French mother tongue remained stable (82%) in Quebec in proportion of its total population (6,810,300 people), while its French population according to home language constantly increased since 1971, reaching 83% in 1991(22).  That year the levels according to French as the home language surpassed by hardly 66,000 people those of the mother tongue.  Can we then maintain that the future of French in Quebec is in safety?  To ask the question is to answer

                         1951           1961                1971                      1981                                1991
mother        3,347,000       4,270,000        4,867,000          5,254,000                    5,586,000
tongue            (82,5%)         (81,2%)           (80,7%)                (82,5%)                      (82,0%)  

home                ___              ___               4,870,000            5,253,000                    5,652,000
language                                                    (80,8%)                (82,5%)                       (83,0%)

Sources : Languages in Canada, Statistics Canada, catalogue number 96-313F (1994)

What in time seems to be a progress in absolute figures must be seriously relativized.  What does this modest gains of 66,000 new francophone speakers mean?  A closer examination of the 1991 census data provided by Statistics Canada reveals that the two major causes to this presumed progress are, first, the decrease of the anglophone population in majority unilingual and second, the gains realized by the endogenous transfers, which compensate for the losses recorded among francophones themselves (exogenous transfers).  In other words, even in Quebec, less people of French mother tongue use their language at home(23).  This is especially true regarding what Richard Joy called the « bilingual belt » of the francophone hard core of Quebec.  In this province, it corresponds roughly to the « West Quebec » studied by Charles Castonguay (1994b).  This specialist of linguistic assimilation brought to the fore that between 1971 and 1991 the frontier area of Hull that is in contact between Ontario and Quebec more anglicized than francized, despite a majority of francophones of about the two-thirds of its total population (81,120 people).  Besides the fact that in 1991 the knowledge of French shows to be weak among non-francophones, going from 22% in 1971 to 41% in 1991, that of English among non-anglophones gains ground, going from 49% in 1971 to 61% in 1991.

3.1.2   Linguistic transfers

Let’s now go back over Quebec taken as a whole.  According to our compilation, the levels of the French mother tongue was 5,573,000 people, which includes the French/third language bilinguals but excludes the French/English bilinguals.  Rightly or wrongly, we consider that a third language does not compete with French and that the bilinguals of official languages form a population on its own insofar as their definitive linguistic option is defered.  Now the number of people who declared speaking exclusively French at home or exclusively this language alternately with a third language amounts to 5,473,000 people, which excludes all cases of transfers from English, a third language or bilinguals other than francophones.  We then see that the number of exogenous transfers amounts to 100,300 francophones, including 85,500 towards English (anglicization), which shows in absolute figures that the use of the French language regressed of 1,8% in the francophone hard core.

Fortunately, we can observe 163,000 endogenous transfers (francization) including 91,000 from ethnic communities that allowed to compensate this loss.  Those complex transfers appear as the following :
                     From French           From English       From a third language    From a third language
                        into English         into English             into French                      into English
                    
1971(a)            73,515                   49,060                      34,580                              84,440

1981(a)            74,995                   40,950                       32,545                              84,745

1986(a)            73,375                   35,965                        29,355                             73,265

1991(b)           93,000(c)               72,000(d)                   91,000(e)                         145,000(f)

Sources and conventions :
(a) Indicateurs de la situation linguistique au Québec, 1992, Government of Quebec, Conseil de la langue française.
(b) Retention and linguistic transfers, 1991, Statistics Canada, catalogue number 94-319.
© This figure includes unilinguals of source and target languages, bilinguals French/English who become unilinguals and unilinguals who become bilinguals at home.  Unilinguals can also speak a third language. 
(d) This figure only includes unilinguals of source and target languages and bilinguals who become unilinguals.
(e) This figure concerns allophones who have or not French as only speech but excludes those who become officially bilinguals.
(f) This figure concerns allophones who have or not English as only home language and includes those who become officially bilinguals. 

Although the census of 1991 data must be used with caution because of a change of method brought to the order in which the questions concerning the language have been asked, this data is explicit enough to indicate with certainty that French is not privileged by the linguistic change of allegiance of allophones, despite its situation of majority speech in Quebec.  Allophones opt at 63% for English only (119,000) and at 37% for French only (69,100).  In this last case, there is a clear improvement in comparison with what this rate was in 1981 (28%) and in 1986 (29%).  All in all, the number of francophones who anglicize themselves (93,000 people) is superior to the number of allophones who francize themselves.  Furthermore, still in 1991, the number of anglophones who completely francize themselves (a gain of 54,300 people) is void by the number of francophones who completely anglicize themselves (a loss of 58,000 people). In calculating the net balance of all endogenous (gains) and exogenous (losses) transfers of each official language, we see that the gains of French are more than twice lower than those of English(24) : 

                    French                               English                                       Other

1971            10,125                               108,895                                     -119,020
1981              -1,500                              118,790                                     -117,290
1986              -8,055                               110,675                                    - 102,620
1991              70,000                                166,000                                   -236,000

That shows that in Quebec, even though the attraction force of the French language seems to have markedly increased since 1986, it does not diminish that of English in any way(25).

3.1.3   An opposing situation

Several situational factors come to cast a gloom over this recent situation which remains, although encouraging, fragile and not very convincing.  First, with a minority population of 756,200 speakers, English assimilates a levels that amounts to nearly 20% of its speakers, while with a majority population of 5,6 million speakers, French only assimilates a levels of a little more than 1% of its speakers.  With a balance of power of 20 against one in favour of English, can we reasonably say that French has won the game in North America?

Then there is the progress of bilingualism, as paradoxal as it may appear.  From where stands the French language, minority language in North America, the unilingual levels is at the heart of the resistance to assimilation (Lieberson, 1970) while the popular bilingualism -or the « integrating » bilingualism of Castonguay (1994c)- constitutes a potential of assimilation.  In Quebec, the number of unilingual francophones, that is to sy those who use French exclusively, amounts to 3,860,000, which represents 57% of the total population of the province and 69% of its francophone population ; at first glance this is reassuring.  But according to Castonguay (1994a), the bilingual levels (1,765,000 people) of the francophone population (5,586,000 people) goes to 32% in 1991 while it was 29% in 1981 and 26% in 1971.  As specifies this specialist : « the number of francophones who declare being bilingual increased by half a million, at the rate of 250,000 every decade.  However, there is an encouraging sign coming from the levels who declared being bilingual from mother tongue.  Those who choose French as home language, a total of 17,200 people, are twice as many as those who choose English (7,500 people).

And then there is the tricky problem of Montreal, that some people would like to resolve in excluding the territory of the island from the jurisdiction of Bill 101 to turn it into the Brussels of Canada.

3.2   The weight of Montreal

With its 3,091,115 inhabitants, Greater Montreal monopolizes more than 45% of all the Qubec population but less than 38% of all the francophone population of this province.  We can notice that 68% of the total population of metropolitan Montreal have a francophone origin and that French is the home language in an identical proportion.  Everywhere else in the province this proportion is 94%.  Incidentally it is, in this last case, an increase of one point in relation to the results of the 1981 census.  However the hard core of the unilingual francophones (1,138,000 people) of Montreal does not even weigh 21% of the francophone population of Quebec.  Is that a proportion for which we can reasonably say that it assures the safety of French in the Quebec metropolis?  Quite obviously, the future of this language in North America will be decided in Montreal because it is really in their metropolis that francophone Quebecers lose a great part of their levels.

On the one hand, we can notice that « the percentage of francophones in the Montreal’s island population suffered a historical decline between 1986 and 1991, passing from 60,1% to 56,6%, at the same time that the proportion of allophones increased in a spectacular way, from 18,7% to 24% (M. Levine, 1993 : 15).  Let’s recall that the francophone population of the Montreal island was 64% in 1951 (Bonin, 1990 : 165).  On the other hand, the rate of French/English bilingualism is 48% in metropolitan Montreal, that is to say a percentage much higher than that observable on th provincial scale.  But among the francophones of Montreal, it is 45,5%, which is both remarkable and worrying.  According to our calculations, the number of exogenous transfers (anglicization) affecting only this population amounts to 60,000, that is to say 64% of all transfers affecting the francophones of Quebec.  As we can expect, almost all of these transfers are due to the bilingual francophone population : we count 57,900 transfers among Montreal bilinguals (953,800 people) and only 1,800 among unilinguals (1,138,800 people).  That shows how bilingualism (defined as the knowledge and not the use of the two official languages) is well and truly the middle step towards a change of linguistic allegiance.

Montreal is really the place where French is the most likely to progress as for its use because it is in this city that are recorded 89% of all gains in favour of this language, that is to say a balance of 62,400 additional speakers.  Furthermore, it is also in Montreal that English made almost all of its gains (98%).  On the other hand, it is not in the Montreal area that anglophones are most likely to francize themselves.  It is somewhere else in the province.  In fact, only 49% of all cases of francization of anglophones can be observed in Montreal, that is to say 35,500 on a total of 72,200.  This corroborates an observation made by specialists saying that it is out of Montreal that French exercises its greatest attraction force on non-francophones.

Finally, the West Island, where is concentrated the majority of the anglophones of Quebec, is the theatre of a growing anglicization since 1971.  In a study that could be described as « surgical », Charles Castonguay (1994b) brings to the fore that the net rate of anglicization among francophones and allophones is higher in 1991 than in 1971 despite the decrease of the number of anglophones (mother tongue) in this region, which allows this population to hold steady at about the same level over this period of 20 years.  This trend to assimilation shows itself in the West Island French schools where linguistic transfers towards English among allophones(11,9%) exceeded transfers towards French (8,3%) in 1989-90 (Levine, 1993 : 22).

3.3   Decrease in the birth rate and linguistic persistence

Let’s put an end to this review of the opposing factors for the safety of French language by putting forward the threat that the phenomenon of decrease of the birth rate represents.  While the fertility rate is 1,86 for Canada as a whole, that of Quebec is only 1,63, which places it under the replacement threshold (2,1 children per woman) since 1970 (Duchesne, 1993 : 53).  In his work written in 1984, demographer George Matthews anticipates that with the impact of demographic factors, Montreal was to start its trend to « depopulation » in 1994, that is to say a decade before that of Quebec, which is generally foreseen in 2006 by demographers.  Moreover, in a study that takes in account several scenarios of international immigration, demographer Marc Termotte (1993) forecasts a phenomenon of « defrancization » not only in the Montreal area but on the provincial scale.  He makes the following assumption : « (...) Should immigration stabilize to an average level (the one observed in 1986-1991) and present fertility (that of 1986-1991) hold steady (...), barely 50% of the inhabitants [of this region] would speak French in 2046, which means that, on the island (we stress on the word) of Montreal, more than half the inhabitants would not speak French ».  The facts are on the way of proving him right.

The problem of the decrease of the birth rate directly has repercussions on the linguistic balance of Montreal and combines not only with the « decline of francophones » in this city but with a higher birth rate among allophone women (2,1).  According to the analysis of Marc Levine (1993; 1990) and recently that of the demographer Michel Paillé (1996),  urban spreading has the effect of attractig francophone families with a low income in the belt residential towns, which leads to a depopulation of the metropolis’ downtown area at the extent that the francophone population fell below 50% among those aged 18 and less.  On the other hand, the veiled resistence to integration from several ethnic communities leads to the opposite movement : the formation of completely defrancized urban zones on the Montreal island. Their attitude is reflected not only in the fact they prefer (rightfully) to gather rather than to disperse among francophones but also in the phenomenon of the persistence of third languages as home languages.  In a study on behalf of the Secretary of State, Kralt & Pendakur (1991) conclude in saying that it is in Quebec that the rates of conservation of third languages are the highest.  More than 45% of children in Quebec whose mother had a non-official language as mother tongue shared this very language, while outside of Quebec only 32% of children spoke their mother’s mother tongue.  These authors add that « the degree to which children pass to the French language is quite low ; it goes from a minimum of 6% for the Greeks and to a maximum of 38% for Arabs ».

The linguistic tolerance that characterizes the province of Quebec and especially Montreal is then real but is the result, in the end, of the French language’s helplessness to assert itself as language of the Quebec identity or at least of the belonging to the French society among the new citizens who rather have a tendency to consider themselves as Canadians « residing » in Quebec.  Such a conclusion is coherent with the fact that Montreal is distinguihed by a retention rate of immigration much higher than that of Toronto : 88% against 63% respectively (Bonin, 1990 : 165).

3.4   French at school

People attach great importance to the fact immigrant children settled in Quebec register massively in French schools since Bill 101 was passed.  The progress is unquestionably remarkable.  During the years it was in force, the « Quebec clause » allowed to bluntly reverse the historical trend.  It only remains to establish the real impact of the « Canada clause » since it was imposed by the Supreme Court in 1984.  However that may be, the proportion of allophone students who studied in French at the primary and secondary levels went, in ten years, from 38,7% in 1980-81 to 75,8% in 1990-91.  During the same period, the number of anglophone students who did the same went from 16% to 19,5%.  In a report filed in June 1995 to the Conseil scolaire de l’île de Montréal, we learn that only13% of allophone students in the French network opt for French, that is to say one student in seven.  It is a rate slightly inferior to that proposed by Levine (1993 : 21) for the period between 1983-84 and 1989-90.  Therefore progress seems to have reached a ceiling since then.

Still according to this report, the density of francophone students required to exercise a certain attraction force on their allophone fellows is decreasing on the island of Montreal.  Francophones now only represent 47,5% of the students in the 454 public primary and secondary schools.  In 1977, the year Bill 101 was promulgated, this proportion was 59%.  Almost one school in five has an allophone majority now.  In any case, we must bear in mind that a student who studies in French does not necessarily become an adult to adopt this language in life.  This can be easily verified.  First by the linguistic mobility of allophone students of Greater Montreal.  On a total of 76,000 in1990-91, only 10,6% of them chose to speak French at home against 14,2% who chose to speak English.  And then by the post-secondary advance.

At the college level, the progress of French is nothing very convincing.  The French sector records an increase of registrations among allophones from 14% to 45% between 1980 and 1990, with a rate of perseverance of 72,6% in the tuition in French in 1990, on the decline since 1986 (81,2%).  As for the higher education, the 12 francophone universities still recruit a minority of allophones, that is 43% in 1990, while the three anglophone universities attract 57% of them.  As we can see, the francophonization of the young immigrants is far from having reached the ideal saturation point in each of the three sectors of education.  Moreover, we know that bilingualism is less assimilating when it implies a more educated population, insofar as it is reputed to be more « instrumental » than « integrating », to take up a distinction made by Castonguay (1994c).  Now, among Quebecers who hold a university diploma, francophones are the less educated.  Only 7,7% of this linguistic group reached this level of education in comparison with 12% among allophones and 14,7% among anglophones.  Consequently, less protected than it would be with a higher level of education, the bilingualism of francophone Quebecers leads more easily to assimilation than to the dialogue of cultures.

3.5   French language and economic promotion

The objective of economic equity between French and English pursued by the legislator in passing Bills 22 and 101 mainly turned on two axes.  First, the generalization of the use of French in all employment sectors and to all rungs of the salary scale.  Then, the francophonization of companies with more than 100, and later 50 employees.  These two axes formed the theme of « French, language of work ».  However, let’s specify beforehand that federal state employees and other employees « of the Crown » are not subject to the measures of the French Language Charter.  Moreover small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with less than 50 employees proliferate in Quebec.  As reports Maurais (1987 : 385), Mr Gaston Cholette, a former president of the Office de la langue française, evaluated to one million (in 2,8 millions) the number of workers not subject to the measures of this law.  The most obvious effects of the legislative measures are especially felt at the level of the linguistic environment : corporate names, roadsigns, commercial display, documentation and advertising.  But the deepest effects surely remain that of the economic promotion of francophones in their own province.  Whether by taking advantage of the coverage of these two successive laws or by suffering coercive measures, the change of mentalities among both francophones and anglophones has been dazzling

3.5.1   The language of work

To legislate in order to make French the « normal and usual » language as regards work in the only Canadian province where it is the only language official appears today as an initiative both legitimate and « positively » discriminatory.  Thus the political  fight allowed to, pardon me this basely venal calque, « deliver the merchandise ».  But the legislative action only stimulated a movement initiated well earlier.  As soon as the beginning of the « quiet revolution », French accelerated its advance as the language of work of a greater number of people in a greater number of sectors.  Generally, as we learn in the latest publication of the Conseil de la langue française about this question(26), the increase of francophones on the labour market goes from 77% in 1971 to 82% in 1991.  In the metropolitan region of Montreal, it goes from 63% to 70%.

Such a progress is not only attributable to the numerical factor.  It is also qualitative.  Let’s first notice the success of the francization operation of companies led since several years under the aegis of the Office de la langue française (OLF).  In 1994, 68% of the 1,866 large companies registered to OLF had obtained their francization certificate, while this percentage was 33 in 1984.  On the 2,368 small and medium enterprises with 50 to 99 employees registered to OLF, 84% had their certificate against 41% in 1984.

The qualitative nature of the advance of French in the working world can also be appreciated by the alder of the variety of affected sectors.  For instance, the three branches of industry the most anglophonized historically in the Greater Montreal area are those of finance, services to companies and high-tech industries.  In 1971, francophones held respectively 57%, 56% and 54% of these positions.  In 1981, their presence climbs to respectively 71%, 68% and 65%, that is proportions that correspond closely enough to the real weight of francophones in the metropolitan region.  In any case, French is the language of work of 88% of the labour force in all Quebec regions except that of Montreal.  This figure cannot let us forget that the unemployment rate (13% in 1986) henceforth affects francophones as well as anglophones and allophones, while in 1971 the linguistic attribute was a significant variable because francophones had the highest unemployment rate, that is 10,6% against 9,3% for anglophones and 8,2% for allophones.  Nevertheless, with regards to the income, bilingual and unilingual anglophones earn more than unilingual francophones, that is 7% more, those being taken as a point of reference.  Moreover, a bilingual francophone also earns 7% more than an unilingual francophone.  It is outside of the Montreal region that the best paid of all workers can be found, that is the bilingual francophone who earns 8% more than the unilingual francophone.  In comparison the unilingual anglophone earns 9% less.  Naturally, the economic progress of francophones goes together with their socio-professional advancement.  We can observe that the francophonization of psitions of executives in companies increases in scale although this advancement is far from reflecting the demographic weight of francophones in the population.  In 1959, only 31% of these positions were held by fraancophones.  In 1988, there were 58%.  Among large companies’ high-ranking directors, francophones were asserting themselves in a proportion of 35% in 1993, while they only represented 19% in 1976.

Of course, there is still a lot to do before the French language is fully established in the working world of Quebec.  Let’s just think, for instance, about all the linguistic pressure exercised by the computer environment on the regular users of a mouse.  The anglicization of the language of work is often taking turns of a tidal wave, hence the pressing necessity of a law like Bill 85.  Indeed almost four companies in ten (37%) use softwares in English only. The quarter of companies use softwares in French only.  Half of the high-technology manufacturing companies put at their employees’ disposal a documentation of logistic support written in English only.  Only a third of them have a French documentation.  In brief, the « technologicaal turn » is accompanied by an additional difficulty for all non-anglophone workers.

3.5.2   French language does not make planes crash

To conclude this quick survey of the language of work, it is proper to place the Quebec legislative action in a sound perspective of evolution.  A law of linguistic planning like Bill 101 is not a magic potion and we must understand that the gains of French are always the result of a catching up whose starting point is a situation of discrimination.  Each gains is obtained at the expense of a fight on the ground supported by a general mobilization for a cause perceived as right and legitimate.  In this respect, the episode of the conflict of bilingualism in the control of air traffic in Canada illustrates better than any other the humiliating nature of certain gains.  It took six years of aggravated quarrels between 1973 and 1979 to obtain what we consider today as perfectly normal everywhere else in the world.  Two trade unions, that of the CATCA (Canadian Air Traffic Controler Association) and that of the CALPAC (Canadian Air Line Pilot Association) led an all-out war to the AGAQ (Association des Gens de l’Air du Québec) to prevent the institution of bilingualism in the Quebec sky by the Canadian Ministry of Transport was only based on the argument that the use of two languages instead of one would reduce air safety in the country.

In 1974, the federal government set up a group to study the problem of bilingualism in air communications called « Project BILCOM ».  Several of its subsequent recommendations were in full agreement with the institution of a partial bilingualism on the Quebec territory by the Ministry of Transport.  The two anglophone unions launched a strike against bilingualism, supported by a favourable public opinion from English Canada and by an extreme publicity campaign.  During the summer of 1976, the Trudeau government instituted a commission in charge of investigating on the possible consequences of the institution of bilingualism in air communications.  To avoid the worst, the Minister of Transport at the time, Mr Otto Lang, signed a secret agreement with the CALPA and the CATCA.  In reply, the AGAQ brought an action against the company Air Canada in the Superior Court of Quebec in order to invalidate one of the regulations forbidding the flying staff members to speak French in the cockpit and in order to force this company to translate its flight and service manuals into French.

After several unfavourable court judgements, the AGAQ finally wan the case before the courts.  The conclusions of the commission of inquiry’s preliminary report added to these legal victories.  This commission concluded in July 1977 that the use of two languages in air communications affected in no way the air safety.  Its recommendations to introduce bilingualism on the Quebec air territory were accepted beyond dispute as well as those of its final report submitted to the Conservative government of Mr Joe Clark in August 1977.  All studies contributed at demonstrating that bilingualism in air communications is as safe as English unilingualism, that it works perfectly well in many airports worldwide, of which those of Geneva and Mexico City, that it can be established at a fair cost and that in fact, they are two ways of doing attributable to the respective cultures of the countries in which civil aviation developped.  In brief, French does not make planes crash or collide.

This episode will have to be a lesson, in our opinion, when the time will come to have further discussion on the famous « cultural exception » relative to the audiovisual sector, which was snatched by the francophone countries during the last GATT negotiation rounds (« Uruguay Round »).  The argument of the lesser cost that, in the eyes of some people, determinates the laws of the market and consequently justifies the Anglo-American unilingualism in international trade, is not more admissible than that of a greater safety to justify the same thing in air communications.

3.6   The « French look » of Quebec

Let’s end this survey of the present situation of the « fait français » in Quebec by examining briefly the conditions of cultural activity in which the French language blossoms today.  As far as the quality of life is concerned, Quebec has become again a French land in its exterior aspect, what some called the « French look » of the « Belle Province »,  Concerning roadsigns, commercial display or exterior advertising, the linguistic appearance of Quebec has become again rather satisfactory, especially in Montreal, considering the North American context.  For instance, a study by the Conseil de la langue française evaluated to 65% or 78% the rate of French unilingualism in all the studied sectors in Montreal in 1986, depending on whether we consider or not among the unilingual French posters the ones that cannot be linguistically classified (proper nouns, brand names).  Let’s specify that this unilingualism does not exclude English.  Thus, in August 1983, the Commission de protection de la langue française noted the names of 3,603 commercial establishments in two quadrilaterals of the Montreal downtown area and evaluated that 740 (21%) of them could preserve English words in their designation without contravening to the French Language Charter (Maurais, 1987 : 379-380).  Between 1978 and 1992, Quebec’s toponymy had reached a rate of francization of 78%.  For the same period, places names of English language had doubled to reach a rate of 11%.

In the whole cultural uniformity of North America, Quebec certainly constitutes a remarkable and amazing exception of vitality in the face of the domination exercised, at this level, by the American popular model especially among francophone youths, as established Uli Rocher, a sociologist at McGill University.  The general acknowledgement that emerges from his study on the behaviour of youths is that « French suffered a decline between 1978 and 1991 in young people’s cultural activities » (Rocher, 1993 : 174).  Naturally, all the variants of popular speech that are widespread among our neighbours of the South constitute one of the medium by which this model tries to infiltrate the French art of living.  Some industries resist better than others.  For instance, the written press and the publishing in French manage rather well.  In Quebec as a whole, there are about ten dailies of French language and some 165 different editions among news weekly.  The proportion of the copies of news wwekly in French went from 52% in 1960 to 86% in 1991.  But this progress of French is artificial because it is due to the decline of English press, which owes its survival to the allophone readership who prefer to be informed in English rather than in French.  Concerning commercial publishing, the situation is relatively stable because the number of titles published in French maintains above 89% since 1980 for Quebec on the whole.  But the situation of the publishing of monographs, books and booklets in registration of copyright turns out to be worrying since 1980, the year Quebec publishing reached a peak in the production of French monographs, that is 91%.  Since then, the trend is dropping.  In 1990, 84% of titles were in French.  It is probable that this rate is presently back to what it was in 1972, that is less than 82%.

Furthermore, the monopoly of production and distribution by the Americans « majors » in the matter of cinema industries (movies and videotapes) does not leave lots of space to French language cinema in Quebec : in 1994, American movies captured 85% of the total audience.  During a lecture he gave in 1987, cinema critic Luc Perreault denounced the fact that he counted only 11 theatres in 72 in Montreal whose programming was intended for the francophone public in a quadrilateral located east of St-Lawrence street.  In a quadrilateral next to the first one, only one theatre in 25 presented the same situation (Perreault, 1987).  Whatever this individual perception, the percentage of movies projected in French in Quebec goes from 72% in 1976 to 54% in 1987, to rise again to 61% in 1990.  A faster availability of versions doubled in French allowed to increase of about 9% in comparison with the year 1993 the audience for projections in French, reaching then the rate of 64% in 1994.  In the field of rented videotapes, the proportion of movies rented in French went from 56% in 1986 to 70% in 1990 to fall again to 67% in 1991.  Moreover, 92% of video games in Quebec are in English.

In 1991, there were no less than 130 radio stations in Quebec, of which 57AM stations and 56 FM stations that broadcast in French.  In 1970, they were 68.  In Montreal, the francophone radio stations get only 64% of the listening hours against 35% for the anglophone stations.  Elsewhere in the province, this percentage is 92 points.  It would be proper to determinate with precision what is the real impact of the government measures aiming at imposing French broadcast quotas to all stations on the listening habits of diverse segments of the Quebec population.

Finally, the viewing hours the francophone Montrealers allow to English-Canadian or American television programs suffer a constant decline since 1983, the year a record was set up with a viewing rate of 28%.  During the autumn of 1991, this rate fell again to 12%.  Elsewhere in Quebec, francophones watch television in English in a proportion of 91% and in English in a proportion of 6%.  

3.7   Future and drift of the vernacular

Though inevitably incomplete, this survey could not pass over an essential aspect in silence, an essential aspect of the present situation of French in Quebec, that is the problem raised by the dialectal reality of Quebec French.  Quite obviously, the French language considerably strenghtened its position in North America in its Quebce enclave, at least at the level of its « surface structure ».  Not only did it strenghten on an objective plane (quantitative), as we just saw, but also on a qualitative plane in several fields, as maintain Hélène Cajolet-Laganière and Pierre Martel in a recent monograph.  But isn’t the concept of French language at odds with that of home language?  Even in having at its disposal this « linguistic model of standard Quebec French » insistently so-called by these two authors (Cajolet-Laganière & Martel, 1995 : 158), the Quebec vernacular, that is to say the everyday speech of the Montreal and Quebec francophone masses, continues to obey the laws of its own linguistic drift, so that the protection of the French language will one day become the protection of a ghost.  The convergence of the evolution of the Quebec speech with regard to its internal structure with the evolution of the francophone speaking masses with regard to its « deep structure » is inescapable.  Such a possibility accentuates the paradox of the diglossia insofar as, especially in its pronunciation, Quebec French considerably got closer to the European variety which represents the most widespread standard ; in other words, it is less dialectal than it was before the « quiet revolution » (Cajolet-Laganière & Martel, 1995 : 69).

But an established model of standard Quebec French will always be linked to the written code of the standard French language which, in any case, restricts its pertinence to the public French widespread on the Quebec territory.  This very French will probably endure for as long as Quebecers will enjoy a political power, enhanced or not. The vernacular, as for it, pursues its divergent trajectory on all points of view : lexical, morphological, syntactic, semantic and stylistic (Barbaud, 1995c)(27).  And it does it all the more securely since its link to the written code does not take advantage anymore of the solidity that could be provided by a mass instruction particularly focussed on the mastery of standard French.  The generations of young Quebecers are then more powerless than ever in softening if not reducing the diglossia that will alienate them more and more.

The utilitarian conception of French programs born of the communicative approach, combined with the linguistic egalitarianism born of the cult of tolerance at any price, encourages the unbridled use of an approximative language.  The result is alarming.  Bibeau (1990 : 230) evaluates « that there is at least a good 50% [of our students] who finish their secondary education without knowing how to write or even read French properly ».  In its report submitted in August 1995 to the Commission des États généraux sur l’éducation, the Conseil de la langue française states that in the national exams of the last 14 years, « barely 40% [of young Quebecers] succeed criteria (sic) relating to grammar and syntax at secondary level while in college, the average mark obtained in 1992 and 1993 is about 50% », that is to say one grammatical, syntactic or spelling mistake every 10 or 12 words.  Similar results are observable in the written French tests that universities are forced to administer to their students.  This organization stresses, in its recommendations, on the necessity for young Quebecers to master standard French both oral and written and the recentre the tuition on the way language works, notably on grammar, and particularly at primary level, by having recourse to sentence analysis and parsing seen as «an exercise of logic and familiarization with the complexity and the subtility of the mind ».  When all is said and done, it is not the fact that grammar is useful for communicating that defines its deep nature but simply the fact that a speaking subject as a thinking being.  This is all the difference between the accessory and the essential.

4.   CONCLUSION

If French-Canadians of Quebec had success in leading their language at the gates of the XXIst century in North America, it is because they always were able to make the most of a political power inherited from the whims of history.  There is the explanation of a unique phenomenon that assimilates into a real feat in the face of the universal order that governs languages in contact.  The present search of an increase of this political power, incarnate by the aspiration for the sovereignty of Quebec among francophone nationalists, ensues from a logic firmly fixed in modern times.  Indeed, the new world situation, with its unprecedented challenges, requires new means to accomplish the same historical task.

Notes

1   About the alliance of French people and Amerindians, see the recent work of Vaugeois (1995).  Let’s recall that the population of the former French colony was 69,335 inhabitants in 1765 (Berthet, 1995).

2   Still according to Berthet, the population of the Anglo-American colonies amounted to 1,640,000 inhabitants.

3     Already in1831, in his famous work De la démocratie en Amérique, Alexis de Tocqueville writes : Lower Canada [Quebec] (...) forms a state on its own.  Now, the French population in Lower Canada was in the English population in a proportion of ten against one.  It is dense.  It has its own government and parliament.  It really forms a distinct corps de nation.  In the Parliament, composed of 84 members, there are 64 French and 20 English ».  Quoted in Bouthillier & Meynaud (1972).

4    With 83% of its population using French as the home language in 1991, according to Statistics Canada (catalogue number 96-313F), the French enclave of Quebec does not even weigh 2% of the whole population of North America.

5     However let’s specify that the Canadian government had adopted some measures, rather symbolical, calling for official bilingualism (postage stamps in 1927 ; banknotes in1936 ; family allowances cheques in 1945 in Quebec only ; simultaneous translation in 1959).

6     Source : Le Canada à l’étude.  Les langues du Canada, Statistics Canada, catalogue number: 96-313F.   It would be useful to recall that one of the clauses of the Charlottetown agreement disavowed in the 1992 referendum guaranteed 25% of the seats in the House of Commons to Quebec, whatever the future evolution of the population of this province.

7     Thanks to a recommendation of the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, Statistics Canada integrated for the first time in the 1971 census the question relating to the most spoken language at home or home language.  The differential between the mother tongue and the home language allows to calculate the « rate of linguistic transfers ».

8     The net migration is the difference between the number of immigrants and the number of emigrants.

9     Moreover Quebec City, « occasionnal capital of the Canadian colony and heart of the French Canada » (Matthews 1984 : 72), was 40% anglophone in 1860 .

10     Source : Annuaire du Québec 1977/1978.  Here, Montreal designates the city and not the metropolitan agglomeration and the language in question is the mother tongue.

11     The word « joual » is due to André Laurendeau.  It is Jean-Paul Desbiens, a.k.a. Frère Untel, who brought it into fashion.  Joual can be defined as a sociologically inferior speech, organized from a highly anglicized instrumental vocabulary and characterized by a hybrid morphology, a rudimentary syntax, an approximative semantics and a vast repertoire of prosodic marks made of swearwords.  For more details, see Cajolet-Laganière & Martel (1995).

12     On this question, see Chantefort (1976) and Saint-Pierre (1976).  For various interpretations of this notion, see Daoust & Maurais (1987).

13     Sources : Annuaire du Québec 1977/1978 and 1979/1980.

14     On this question, refer to Daoust (1982), Bourhis (199 ), Maurais (1987) and Plourde (1988).

15     In his Annual Report 197_, the Commissioner of Official Languages stated that he received % of complaints.

16     A summarized English version of this law can be found in J. Crawford, ed. (1992 : 435-445).

17     This commission will become the Commission de protection de la langue française in 1983.

18      However, Statistics Canada (1994 : 60) specifies that 25,000 anglophones of other provinces migrated in Quebec during the same period, which brings back to 100,000 people the net loss of the population of English mother tongue.

19     The original text of these constitutional clauses can be found in J. Crawford, ed. (1992 : 433-435).

20     Source : Rapport, Commission nationale sur l’avenir du Québec, Government of Quebec, April 1995, p. 48.

21     R. J. Joy (1967, ch. XI) talks about « a fatal bleeding ».  Let’s specify that this emigration was not only a Quebec emigration. According to the estimations of this author, 2,8 million Canadians emigrated in the United States during this period and about 500,000 people were repatriated during the last 40 years.

22     In its Rapport of April 1995, the Commission nationale sur l’avenir du Québec reports that since July 1st 1994, the population of the province had passed the 7-million inhabitants mark (7,281,000 people), that is 24,9% of the Canadian population.

23     This conclusion renews the one that Castonguay (1994c : 288) and some other have already formulated on the base of the 1986 census.

24    We obtain the balance of French by adding up, for every voting year, the figures of the two interior colums of the preceding chart and then subtracting the figure of the first column.  For English, we add up the figures of the two exterior columns and then we subtract the figure of the second column.  For a third language, the negative balance is obtained by adding up the figures of the two last columns.

25     Insofar as the 1991 census data is reliable, our conclusion would tend to show a spectacular reversal of situation since 1986 because, as writes Castonguay (1994c : 197) about the 1971-1986 period : « (...)the net rate of relative attraction of French, according to net complete transfers (...) seems to have lost ground in 15 years, from 0,27 to 0,25.

26     All data relative to this question comes from Indicateurs de la langue du travail au Québec, édition 1994, Government of Quebec, Conseil de la langue française, 1995.

27      See also on this question an issue of Culture, vol. XIV, number 2, 1994, published by the Canadian Society of Anthropology.            

References

AMBROISE, A. (1986). Modernisation politique et administrative au Québec (1960-1985). In R. Pelletier & J. Zylberberg (Eds), État et Société au Canada, col. Laboratoire d’études politiques et administratives (87-19), Université Laval (pp. 133-167).
BAILLARGEON, Mireille (1983). Évolution et caractéristiques linguistiques des échanges migratoires interprovinciaux et internationaux du Québec depuis 1981. In L’état de la langue française au Québec: Bilan et prospectives, IV: La situation démographique, Québec: Conseil de la langue française.
BARBAUD, Ph. (1993). La loi de la langue. Le Devoir (October 27th).
BARBAUD, Ph. (1994). Protection de la langue et économie. Québec français, 93, pp. 69-74.
BARBAUD, Ph. (1995). Tendances lourdes du français québécois. In Actes du colloque d’Avignon sur «Les français d’Amérique du Nord en situation minoritaire» (To appear).
BERTHET, T. (1992). Seigneurs et colons de Nouvelle-France. Cachan: Éditions de l’École nationale supérieure de Cachan.
BIBEAU, G. (1990). L’enseignement du français. In L’éducation 25 ans plus tard! Et après?, F. Dumont & Y. Martin (Eds.), Québec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture.
BONIN, D. (1990). L’immigration au Québec en 1990: à l’heure des choix. In R. L. Watts & D. M. Brown (Eds.) Canada: The State of the Federation 1990 (pp. 137-176). Kingston, Ont.: Queen’s University, Institute of Intergovernmental Relations.
BORINS, S. F. (1983). The Language of the Skies: The Bilingual Air Traffic Control Conflict in Canada. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
BOURHIS, R. Y. (1994). Introduction and Overview of Language Events in Canada. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 106.
BOURHIS, R. Y. & LEPICQ, D. (1993). Québécois French and Language Issue in Quebec. In R. Posner & J. N. Green (Eds.), Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology. Volume 5:Bilingualism and Linguistic Conflict in Romance (pp. 345-381). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
BOUTHILLIER, G. & MEYNAUD, J. (1972). Le choc des langues au Québec 1760-1970. Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec.
CAJOLET-LAGANIÈRE, H. & MARTEL, P. (1995). La qualité de la langue au Québec, col. «Diagnostic» 18. Québec: Institut Québécois de Recherche sur la Culture.
CALVET, J.-L. (1987). La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques. Paris: Payot.
CASTONGUAY, Ch. (1994a). La langue en question. Le Devoir, 11 janvier.
CASTONGUAY, Ch. (1994b). Dominance de l’anglais. Le Devoir, 23 novembre.
CASTONGUAY, Ch. (1994c). L’assimilation linguistique: mesure et évolution 1971-1986. Conseil de la langue française. Sainte-Foy: Les Publications du Québec.
CORBEIL, J.-C. (1980). L’aménagement linguistique du Québec. Montréal: Guérin.
CHANTEFORT, P. (1976). Diglossie au Québec: Limites et tendances actuelles. Cahiers de linguistique de l’université du Québec, 6, pp. 23-54.
CRAWFORD, J. (Ed.). (1992). Languages Loyalties, Chicago/London: Chicago University Press.
DAOUST, D. (1982). La planification linguistique au Québec: un aperçu des lois sur la langue. Revue québécoise de linguistique, 12(1), pp. 9-76.
DAOUST, D. & MAURAIS, J. (1987). L’aménagement linguistique. In J. Maurais (Ed.), Politique et aménagement linguistique (pp. 5-46). Montréal/Paris: Conseil de la langue française/Le Robert.
DUCHESNE, L. (1993). La situation démographique au Québec. Édition 1993. Col. «Statistiques démographiques». Québec: Les Publications du Québec.
FERGUSON, Ch. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15, pp. 325-340.
GREY, J. (1995). Des “vérités” à démolir. Le Devoir, 5 décembre.
KRALT, John & PENDAKUR, R. (1991). Ethnicité, immigration et transfert linguistique. Unpubished manuscript, Gouvernement du Canada: Secrétariat d’État.
JOY, R. (1967). Languages in Conflict: The Canadian Experience, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
LAVOIE, Y. (1973). Les mouvements migratoires des Canadiens entre leur pays et les États-Unis au XIXe et au XXe siècle: étude quantitative. In H. Charbonneau (Ed.) La population du Québec, études rétrospectives (pp. 73-88). Montreal: Boréal Express.
LECLERC, J. (1987). La guerre des langues dans l’affichage. Essai. Montreal: VLB.
LEMCO, J. (1992). Quebec’s “Distinctive Character” and the Question of Minority Rights. In Crawford, J. (Ed.). (1992). Languages Loyalties, pp. 423-445. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
LEVINE, Marc V. (1993). Au-delà des lois linguistiques: la politique gouvernementale et le caractère linguistique de Montréal dans les années 1990. In Contextes de la politique linguistique québécoise (pp.1-40). Conseil de la langue française: Les Publications du Québec.
LIEBERSON, S. (1970). Language and Ethnic Relations in Canada, New York: Wiley.
MATTHEWS, G. (1984). Le choc démographique. Montreal: Boréal Express.
MAURAIS, J. (Ed.). (1987). L’expérience québécoise d’aménagement linguistique. In J. Maurais (Ed.), Politique et aménagement linguistique (pp. 361-416). Montreal/Paris: Conseil de la langue française/Le Robert.
PAILLÉ, M. (1996). Pour en finir avec les “pures laines”. Le Devoir, 5 janvier.
PLOURDE, M. (1988). La politique linguistique du Québec 1977-1987, col. «Diagnostic» 6. Québec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture. 
PERREAULT, L. (1987). La situation dans le domaine du cinéma. L’avenir du français au Québec (pp. 165-174). Montreal: Québec-Amérique.
ROCHER, U. (1993). La force d’attraction du français et les attitudes et les comportements des jeunes. In Contextes de la politique linguistique québécoise (pp. 157-181). Conseil de la langue française: Les Publications du Québec.
ST-GERMAIN, C. (1980). La situation linguistique dans les écoles primaires et secondaires 1971-72 à 1978-79, col. «Dossier du Conseil de la langue française» 3. Québec: Conseil de la langue française. 
SAINT-PIERRE, M. (1976). Bilinguisme et diglossie dans la région montréalaise. Cahiers de linguistique de l’université du Québec, 6, pp. 179-198.
TERMOTE, M. (1980). Le bilan migratoire du Québec, 1951-1977 - L’évolution récente située dans une perspective de long terme. In M. Amyot (Ed.), La situation démolinguistique au Québec et la Charte de la langue française (pp. 13-40), col. «Documentation du Conseil de la langue française» 5.
TERMOTE, M. (1993). L’incidence du facteur démographique sur l’usage du français au Québec. In Contexte de la politique linguistique québécoise (pp. 41-78). Québec: Les Publications du Québec.
VAILLANCOURT, F. (1985). Un aperçu de la situation économique des anglophones et francophones du Québec, de 1961 à 1971, et de l’impact possible sur cette situation du projet de loi 1. In F. Vaillancourt (Ed.). Économie et Langue (pp. 117-156), col. «Documentation du Conseil de la langue française» 20. Québec: Conseil de la langue française. 
VAUGEOIS, D. (1995) La Fin des alliances franco-indiennes. Montreal: Boréal.
WARDAUGH, R. (1983) Language and Nationhood: The Canadian Experience. Vancouver: New Star Books.
WARDAUGH, R. (1987). Languages in Competition. Oxford/New York: Basil Blackwell.
WOEHRLING, J. (1993). Politique linguistique et libre-échange: l’incidence de l’Accord de libre-échange entre le Canada et les États-Unis sur la législation linguistique du Québec (à la lumière de l’expérience de la Communauté économique européenne). In  Contextes de la politique linguistique québécoise (pp. 79-124). Conseil de la langue française: Les Publications du Québec.

Tableau 1: Population française selon la langue maternelle et
la langue d’usage 
(Les pourcentages indiquent la proportion des chiffres par rapport à la population totale de la province, soit 6,810,300 in 1991)

	1951	1961	1971	1981	1991	
Langue
maternelle	3,347,000
(82.5%)	4,270,000
(81.2%)	4,867,000
(80.7%)	5,254,000
(82.5%)	5,586,000
(82.0%)	
Langue
d’usage	
     	
     	4,870,000
(80.8%)	5,253,000
(82.5%)	5,652,000
(83.0%)	
Source : Statistique Canada, 1994. Québec: Conseil de la langue française. 

Table 2: Linguistic transferts in Quebec,
for four census periods

	From French
to English	From English
to French	From a third
language
to French	From a third
language
to English	
1971	73,515	49,060	34,580	84,440	
1981	74,995	40,950	32,545	84,745	
1986	73,375	35,965	29,355	73,265	
1991	93,000(a)	72,000(b)	91,000(c)	145,000(d)	

Sources: Statistique Canada pour l’année 1991 et le Conseil de la langue française (Québec) pour les autres années.
Notes:
(a) Ce chiffre inclut les unilingues de langue maternelle et de langue d’usage, les bilingues français/anglais qui sont devenus unilingues et les unilingues de langue maternelle française qui sont devenus bilingues à l’usage. L’unilingue peut aussi parler une langue tierce.
(b) Ce chiffre inclut les unilingues de  langue maternelle et de langue d’usage et les bilingues français/anglais qui sont devenus unilingues à l’usage.
(c) Ce chiffre exclut les allophones qui sont devenus bilingues français/anglais.
(d) Ce chiffre inclut les allophones qui sont devenus bilingues français/anglais.