In Maclean’s, Heather Scoffield wonders if the twin keystones of “official” Canadian identity (as defined by the Liberal party in 1969) are actually in opposition to one another:
Have the two forces that have defined Canadian culture for the past 40 years — multiculturalism and bilingualism — turned on each other?
The final release of 2011 census data this week will offer Canadians some insight into the answer.
On Wednesday, Statistics Canada will publish language data showing how many people speak English, how many speak French, and how many speak a myriad of other languages — a consequence of increasingly diverse immigration.
In the last census, in 2006, the number of people who called French their mother tongue was almost — but not quite — on par with the number of people who identify other languages as their first.
If the trend lines continue, as the experts expect they will, they could cross come Wednesday. Measured in terms of percentage of the total population in Canada, French is expected to continue its long, slow decline as a mother tongue and “other” languages will continue their ascent, with the number of allophones — those with a mother tongue other than Canada’s two official languages — surpassing their francophone counterparts.
So have we reached the point where the twin forces unleashed during the 1970s are now competing forces, with multiculturalism drowning out bilingualism?
