One language at home, another at work
MANY QUEBEC HOUSEHOLDS are defying Statistics Canada’s traditional linguistic categorizations
Victor Armony and Viviana Fridman speak Spanish at home with their children Emma, 13, and Alex, 9.
That makes t hem allophones — people whose first language is neither French nor English.
But Armony, a professor of sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, has a problem with the label.
The fact is, he says, many people who speak a non-official language at home actually function in the majority language from the moment they walk out the door every morning.
“When I introduce myself in my courses at UQÀM, I say, ‘At home, my wife, my children and I speak Spanish,’ ” Armony said.
“But my children go to French school, my wife and I both work in French, and so on. So why count people by mother tongue or language spoken at home? Why not use a different measure, like language of education, language of work or ability to speak French?” he asked.
Households like the Armony family are the reason that, for the first time in decades, Statistics Canada did not use the word “allophone” when it released results of the 2011 census on language Wednesday.
Instead, the federal agency used the term “immigrant languages” to describe languages spoken by newcomers and their descendants.
Nor will you find the terms francophone and anglophone in the latest census results.
That’s because it’s no longer as easy as it once was to pigeonhole people as English-speakers or Frenchspeakers, said Jean-Pierre Corbeil, chief specialist of language statistics at Statistics Canada.
Quebec’s increasing linguistic diversity means many people, particularly in the Montreal area, don’t fit neatly into those boxes, he noted.
The latest census gives results by mother tongue; language(s) spoken at home; ability to conduct a conversation in French or English; and first official language spoken (the official language in which you are more comfortable).
Daniel Weinstock, a law professor at McGill University and longtime observer of Quebec’s language dynamics, said it is increasingly evident that the traditional categories of francophone, anglophone and allophone are outdated.
“In my childhood, it really did make sense to speak in terms of these almost hermetically sealed linguistic boxes,” Weinstock said.
“I think the linguistic real- ity of a lot of people on the island — and allophones probably chief among them — is much more fluid,” he added.
Today, Weinstock said, many Montrealers defy categorization, including the many McGill students he hears switching effortlessly between English, French and a third language.
In recent years, a series of studies by the Parti Québécois and the Office Québécois de la langue française have warned that French is threat- ened in Montreal because of increasing diversity.
But Armony, the Argentine-born author of Le Québec expliqué aux immigrants (Quebec explained to immigrants), published by VLB éditeur in 2007, said those studies misrepresent reality by portraying immigrants as having failed to integrate into the French-speaking majority.
“Based on that, our household is contributing to the decline of French, because we are counted as four fewer people whose first language is French,” Armony said.
In fact, he said, you don’t have to live entirely in French to participate in the city’s vibrant French culture.
“When you look at my children, there’s no doubt about it: they are integrated. They are francophones. They are also trilingual, like me. And you have to see that as a strength, not a threat,” Armony said.
Quebec receives about 50,000 immigrants each year, of whom 60 per cent have some knowledge of French. Most settle in the Montreal area.
Concerns that French is doomed in Montreal are partly rooted in identity issues, Armony said, drawing a parallel between anxiety over the threat newcomers pose to French and the 2007 debate over reasonable accommodation of religious minorities.
“When you say there are too many people who don’t speak French as their mother tongue, it’s a way of saying there are too many non-Québécois,” Armony said.
“There’s a certain rejection of difference, a difficulty in seeing immigrants as anything other than a threat to identity,” he added.
But Armony predicted those tensions will subside as immigrants increasingly becoming part of Quebec’s French-speaking mainstream.
“I can see this microcosm in my children’s schoolyard in N.D.G.,” he said, “where anglophone, francophone and allophone children mix completely naturally, without any friction or tension.”