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This demolinguistic portrait of the French-speaking population in New Brunswick was undertaken with the financial support of Canadian Heritage's Official Languages Secretariat, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) and the Department of Justice Canada. It is the fifth in a series of demolinguistic portraits of official-language minorities in Canada, prepared by Statistics Canada's Language Statistics Section.

This study paints a general statistical portrait of the official-language minority in New Brunswick based on data from the Census of Population and the Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities (SVOLM) in Canada, conducted in 2006. The purpose of such a portrait is to present a set of characteristics, behaviours and perceptions of the minority official-language population, exploiting the analytical opportunities contained in the data.

This document is intended to be neither a mere collection of tables nor an in-depth study of the demolinguistic dynamics of the French-speaking population in New Brunswick. It presents a range of information on a set of themes and issues that are of interest for official-language minorities and anyone interested in the past, present and future situation of minority official-language populations in Canada.

Section 1 of this demolinguistic portrait concerns the choice of criteria for defining the French-speaking population in New Brunswick, to be used for the purposes of this document. It also provides a brief description of the data sources used.

Section 2 presents varied information on how the French-speaking population has evolved and its geographic distribution and concentration in New Brunswick. This information is accompanied by a series of appended maps and a detailed table on the number, relative weight and distribution of the French-speaking population in New Brunswick.

Section 3 concerns the main factors that affect or are affected by changes over time in this province's French-speaking population: fertility; the transmission of mother tongue and the effect of exogamy; the age structure; intragenerational linguistic mobility; and interprovincial and international migration. It also provides information on the use of French in the public sphere and on how the ability to conduct a conversation in that language has evolved according to mother-tongue group.

Section 4 of this portrait looks at a few key sectors for the vitality of minority official-language communities, as identified in the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality 2008–2013: Acting for the Future1: health, justice, education and the media, the arts and culture. It also provides statistics on community participation, employment and income characteristics, and the use of French at work.

The last section of this portrait presents statistics on Francophones' identity, their perceptions of the presence of French in their community, the provision of services in French by the federal government, the respect for linguistic rights, and the perceived importance that people work on developing the Francophone community.


Note

  1. When referring to this official-language strategy of the federal government, the expression "Roadmap" will be used throughout this report.
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