Allophones: Difference between revisions

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== See also ==
== See also ==


* [[Terminology]]
* [[Statistics]]
* [[Statistics]]

Latest revision as of 22:22, 28 February 2008

Québec's allophone community represents approximately 6.5% of Québec's total population when counting individuals who, during the population census conducted by Statistics Canada in 2001, claimed to speak mostly a language other than French or English at home.

General

Is an allophone someone whose first language or language of adoption is neither French or English. An allophone may therefore be a native speaker of any language that is not French or English, and the language that this person speaks in the privacy of his or her home is still neither French nor English.

The Quebec allophone population numbers ~460,000 when counting by home language. Yet there are ~732,000 native speakers of a language other than French or English in Quebec. It therefore follows from this that Quebec's francophone and anglophone communities assimilate a significant proportion of allophones.

Allophones may speak languages other than their home language, often French or English or both.

The competition of the English and French languages in the public space in Quebec creates a unique situation in North America where non-anglophone immigrants tend to become bilingual by learning English and eventually assimilate to mainstream English-speaking American life. In Quebec, the trend of anglicization is present, very present, but is counteracted by Quebec's language policy which seeks to make French the common public language instead of English.

Important language community by population size are Spanish, Italian, Arab, Creole languages, Greek, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish and Russian.

See also