OTTAWA – The French language has taken a hit in Manitoba, where
fewer people speak it as a first language or in conversation, according to the
latest 2011 census data released by Statistics Canada on Wednesday.
French is now the mother tongue of just four per cent of
Manitobans, dropping from 4.2 per cent recorded during the previous census.
Fewer people also identified French as their first language as part of the 2011
census.
Not only are there fewer native French speakers, the census
suggests bilingualism levels took a dive over the past five years.
The share of Manitobans who can carry on a conversation in
both English and French fell by half a percentage point to 8.8 per cent from
9.3 per cent in 2006 – a rate matched in Ontario and British Columbia as the
largest decrease in the country.
“We are sorely lacking in our promotion of official
bilingualism, not bilingualism policy, but our promotion of learning knowledge
of English and French,” said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association
for Canadian Studies in Montreal. “Outside of Quebec, we are sorely remiss in
this area.”
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Across Canada nearly 10 million people said they could conduct a conversation in French, up from 9.6 million five years earlier; however, as a proportion of the population, those able to speak French slipped to 30.1 per cent, down from 30.7 per cent in 2006.
While Canada has an official languages policy in place,
Jedwab said it needs to provide more incentives to learn French, including
requirements not only to work for the government, but to do business with them.
It’s a trend that transcends provincial borders with the
census data showing the proportion of people able to converse in French
dropping to 17.5 per cent in 2011 from 17.4 per cent in 2006. Quebec was the
only place where bilingualism levels actually increased.
The tranche of data is part of the latest in a series of
releases from Statscan showing the changing face and voice of Canada revealed
in the 2011 census.
Wednesday’s number show Canada is increasingly a country of
many tongues, with nearly 20 per cent of Canada’s population speaking a
language other than English or French at home.
Out of the 200 reported languages – excluding English and
French – Punjabi, Chinese languages, Spanish, Tagalog, Arabic, Mandarin,
Italian, Urdu and German were the most common across the country.
Tagalog, the dominant language of the Philippines, saw the
largest growth nationwide, increasing by 64 per cent as a home language.
Jedwab said language distribution in Canada is driven by
immigration.
“Mandarin will be stronger in some parts of the country.
Punjabi is more important in Vancouver. It’ll be reflection of immigration
patterns, where people settle, to the extent the distribution is varying so too
is the language proportion.”
The trends are reflected in Manitoba’s biggest city.
Out of the 191 languages counted in the census, 148 of them can be found
somewhere on the streets of Winnipeg. Tagalog is the most common immigrant
language spoken at home in Winnipeg, accounting for nearly 25 per cent of the
non-official languages in the city.
In fact, the number of Tagalog speakers outstrips the
number for French speakers in terms of languages spoken at home.
Other dominant non-official languages in Winnipeg include
Punjabi, Chinese languages, German and Spanish.
– with a files from The Canadian Press
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