Article content
For the first time in a census, more than half of those residing in Quebec can carry on a conversation in English.
This is one of the findings that emerged from a data series on ethnicity, language and immigration published by Statistics Canada on Tuesday, titled Key Facts on the English Language in Quebec in 2021.
Article content
The document says 4,344,550 people who resided in Quebec in 2021 (51.7 per cent of the population) were able to carry on a conversation in English, “the highest ever observed for the province in a census.”
Article content
The progression has been constant since 1991 and is higher for those with French as their mother tongue. The proportion of Quebec residents who can converse in English and whose first language is French reached 42.2 per cent in 2021, compared with 31.4 per cent in 1991.
The same cannot be said for French conversation, however. Of those who speak English, about 10 per cent — 445,575 — could converse in English but not in French.
“After decreasing in the 1990s, this number has been rising since 2001, and in 2021 topped the 1991 figure (+71,820 people),” write study authors Nicolas Auclair, Catherine Frigon and Gabriel St-Amant. “In 2021, these people represented 5.3 per cent of the Quebec population, down slightly from 1991 (5.5 per cent), but higher than in 2016 (4.6 per cent).”
The ability to converse in English is far from being limited to Montreal and the Outaouais. The authors note that in 250 of the 1,168 municipalities in Quebec, at least 50 per cent of residents could carry on a conversation in English.
“The municipalities with a population of more than 500 that had the highest proportion of people who could speak English were Bonne-Espérance, a municipality in the Basse-Côte-Nord where the entire population could have a conversation in English, as well as L’Isle-aux-Allumettes (99.6 per cent) and Shawville (99.4 per cent) in the Pontiac region in Outaouais.”
The study says the municipalities with the largest number of people who know English are Montreal (1,225,790 people), Laval (287,340) and Quebec City (233,880).
More than half of Quebecers can now speak English: Statistics Canada - Montreal Gazette
Read More
No comments:
Post a Comment