TORONTO – Hardly on the bus or in the subway you will hear people of the same origin speak in English: among them, Japanese people will always continue to speak in Japanese, Chinese people in Chinese, Italians in Italian and so on. To confirm what is already heard every day around the city, it comes a survey conducted by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies, from which we see that the vast majority of Canadians report a strong attachment to the main language, the native one, much more than other indicators of identity, including the Country they call home: Canada.

In fact, according to the survey (carried out online on a sample of 1,764 Canadians between 8 and 10 July), 88% of respondents reported a strong sense of attachment to their mother tongue, while 85% reported the same attachment for Canada too. And this is especially true for French speakers and indigenous peoples. For Canadians whose primary language is French, 91% reported a strong sense of attachment to their language, compared with 67% who reported the same feeling for Canada.

The relationships of strong attachment to the primary language have all surpassed the other indicators of ethnic identity, including geography, group, identity, belonging, religious affiliation: the latter, in particular, stops at 37%.

President of the Association for Canadian Studies, Jack Jedwab, says the survey results highlight the important role language plays in people’s identities. “I think many Canadians might be surprised, that they may not intuitively think that language is as important as other expressions of identity that may attract more attention,” he said.

“Historically we have not paid enough attention to indigenous languages, in which we are now seeing our federal government invest heavily, trying to help support and revive indigenous languages,” Jedwah said, noting that the language has a dual function: to facilitate communication and being an expression of culture.

The results precede Statistics Canada’s latest census of languages ​​in the country, which will be published next week. Jedwab said the Statistics Canada census release will be especially important for Quebec, where there is close monitoring of the status of the French language relative to other languages. And speaking of the French-speaking province, Leger’s poll also found that more than half of French-speaking Quebecers say they know English well enough to hold a conversation. This is in contrast to another finding: fewer than 1 in 10 English respondents in all provinces, except Quebec and New Brunswick, are able to have a conversation in French. According to the latest census, English-French bilingualism had gone from 17.5% in 2011 to 17.9% in 2016, reaching the highest rate of bilingualism in Canadian history: but over 60% of that growth in bilingualism was attributable to Quebec. Outside that province, apart from English, there are other languages. Those of origin.

Pic by Наталия Когут from Pixabay