“It corresponds to what we’ve been saying for a few years, which is that Laval is becoming more and more anglicized, and that French is occupying an increasingly secondary role,” he said on the phone, when asked to react to the linguistic portrait of Laval emanating from the 2021 census data, published a few hours earlier by Statistics Canada.

Urgency to Act

Desautels also added that “we will need to take very strong actions if we really want to save French in Laval”.

He sees in the situation an urgency to do something.

“If we do nothing, we’ll simply disappear,” he said. “We can say that in probably five or 10 years, Laval will have become a bilingual city, and in 20 years, a unilingual English-speaking city. This is absolutely evident from current trends.”

First, he really hopes that Laval’s French language committee, that the City intends to set up, will get under way quickly.

“This committee needs to come to life in the coming months, because in two years, it will be too late”, Desautels said.

Take Drastic Measures

To stop anglicization, which is constantly gaining ground in Laval, Desautels asks the municipal administration to, in the future, “communicate with all citizens in French only”.

Unlike municipalities whose status is bilingual, Laval remains a French-speaking city and isn’t required by law to address its citizens in the language of Shakespeare, regardless of whether they communicate in English with Laval’s administration, argues the president of the SNQL.

“Everything, absolutely everything should be in French only,” he insisted, while mentioning digital, oral and written communications. “The more bilingual documents we offer, the more we encourage people who don’t speak French to continue not doing it.”

translated by Alec Brideau

L’article The French Language “Seriously Threatened” in Laval, Says the President of the SNQL est apparu en premier sur Courrier Laval news.

That situation can be seen in all regions of Quebec, except that of Gaspésie–Îles-de-la-Madeleine, where French registered a gain of 1.1 per cent.

Compared to Montreal

After the Nord-du-Québec, Laval recorded the biggest drop of percentage points (-three per cent), ahead of  Montreal and the Outaouais, where French fell by 2.4 per cent.

At 68.9 per cent, Laval is ranked 15th in the ranking of regions, behind the Nord-du-Québec (31.1 per cent) and Montreal (58.4 per cent).

Slowing Down in Quebec

The demographic weight of people speaking French predominantly at home in Quebec has been decreasing since 2001, says the agency in charge of the population census in the country.

In 20 years, this weight has gone from 81.1 to 77.5 per cent. In the 2016 census, the proportion of Quebecers whose home language was French was 79 per cent. That said, in 2021, 85.5 per cent of Quebec’s population said they were speaking French at home at least regularly.

Between 2016 and 2021, the proportion of the population whose mother tongue was French dropped below 75 per cent, going from 77.1 to 74.8 per cent. During the same period, Quebecers having French as their first official language went from 83.7 to 82.2 per cent, while 93.7 per cent of Quebec residents said, in 2021, they could hold a conversation in French, down 0.8 per cent from five years earlier.

Finally, at the last census, the number of people for whom English is the first official language spoken It passed the milestone of one million people, representing 13 per cent of Quebec’s population.

translated by Alec Brideau

L’article Important Decline of the French Language in Laval est apparu en premier sur Courrier Laval news.