Section 1 Definitions of Alberta's French-speaking population

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• Data sources

This statistical portrait of Alberta's official-language minority contains information drawn from variables from the Canadian censuses. Up to 2006, these included no fewer than six questions or sub-questions on official languages: knowledge of official languages, language spoken most often at home, other languages spoken on a regular basis at home, mother tongue, language used most often at work, and other languages used on a regular basis at work.

What is the definition of the minority official-language group in Alberta? How is a Francophone defined? There is actually no established definition. For historical reasons, Statistics Canada has generally used the criterion of mother tongue, that is, the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood at the time of the census. Statistics based on mother tongue have the advantage of being roughly comparable going back more than half a century.

Other criteria are also used, opening the way for either more inclusive or more restrictive definitions of French-speaking persons. Thus, does the definition of a Francophone in Alberta apply to the roughly 65,000 persons who reported French as their mother tongue in the 2006¹ Census,² the 63,000 persons with French as their first official language spoken, or the 57,000 persons³ who speak French most often (24,000) or on a regular basis (33,000) at home? Or should a broader definition be considered? Such a definition might include all of the approximately 225,000 French speakers, or indeed more if we include young children who do not speak French, but who have at least one parent whose mother tongue is French. These are only a few examples of the variables that can be used to define language groups.⁴

Also, in choosing a strategy for estimating a language group, it is important to take into account at least two main options. On the one hand, if the objective is to enumerate the population considering all language groups on an equal basis—in other words, treating them symmetrically and creating mutually exclusive categories for estimating them (e.g., English, French, Other)—then this implies an appropriate allocation of multiple responses. In such a case, the French-mother-tongue population of Alberta would be nearly 65,000. On the other hand, if one wishes to focus on a single language group (e.g., Francophones), one can broaden the criteria for inclusion without being concerned about the implicit overlap between language groups. In this case, the number of French mother tongue persons in Alberta would be more than 68,000.

This statistical portrait of Alberta Francophones mainly uses two criteria: mother tongue and first official language spoken. The latter criterion is now used increasingly to define language groups in studies on official-language minorities. The reason for this is that the composition of the Canadian population has shifted over the years, calling on researchers to redefine or broaden the concept of Francophone group or community: a significant number of persons whose mother tongue is neither French nor English nevertheless use French either predominantly or commonly in their daily lives.

The concept of "first official language spoken" was created based on a number of considerations. Firstly, the substantial increase in immigration to Canada since the mid-1980s has had the effect of increasing the size of the population with a mother tongue other than English or French (20% in 2006). Such persons are often designated as "allophones."

Since an allophone cannot be a Francophone by reason of mother tongue but can become one by adopting French as the language used most often at home or in the public sphere, the question arises as to how to designate an individuals' first official language spoken, or more specifically, how to allocate allophones between English and French based on the reported knowledge of either official language.

Questions of this type led to the development of different variants of the concept of first official language spoken (Statistics Canada, 1989). This concept echoes the spirit of the current version of the Official Languages Act (1988), which specifies in section 32(2) that the government may consider "the English or French linguistic minority population of the area served by an office or facility, the particular characteristics of that population and the proportion of that population to the total population of that area."

The concept of first official language was chosen by the federal government, in December 1991, in the Official Languages Regulations (Communications with and Services to the Public). Section 2 of the Regulations describes the method used to determine "the first official language spoken," namely the first of the two variants presented in Statistics Canada (1989), a method that successively takes into account the responses to the following questions: knowledge of official languages, mother tongue and language spoken most often at home. The "first official language spoken" variable is thus not a census question but is instead derived from three questions in the language module of the census.

The concept of first official language spoken (FOLS) serves to allocate the Canadian population between the country's two main language groups. In Canada, just over 97% of the population has either English or French as a first official language spoken. The residual portion is composed of persons who cannot conduct a conversation in either of the two official languages (1.6%) and persons who know both English and French but who cannot be assigned one or the other of the two official languages on the basis of the three census variables used for this purpose (1.1%).

Unlike the population with French as a mother tongue, the Francophone population according to the FOLS criterion excludes most persons for whom French is the mother tongue but who reported being unable to conduct a conversation in French at the time of the census. Also, it includes persons with an "other" mother tongue (i.e., other than English or French) who speak French most often at home as well as those who, while having an "other" language as the main home language, can also conduct a conversation in French but not in English. It also includes half the persons who can conduct a conversation in English and French who speak an "other" language or both official languages most often at home.

This report will draw a statistical portrait of Francophones in Alberta, primarily using the FOLS criterion, but when relevant, will also draw from information on mother tongue.⁵ Following the practice of the Treasury Board Secretariat, Alberta's Francophone population will refer here to persons having only French as their first official language spoken (FOLS), or Francophone minority, and half the population who have both English and French as their FOLS, (and for whom it is not possible to assign either English or French based on responses to the three variables mentioned above).

Data sources

This portrait of the French-speaking population in Alberta contains information drawn from Canadian censuses from 1951 to 2006 and the Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities (SVOLM)⁶ conducted in 2006 by Statistics Canada.

Census: The census data contained in this report are drawn from the long census questionnaire, completed by 20% of households and including 61 questions of which 7 are language-related.

Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities (SVOLM): This is a cross-sectional sample survey. Respondents to the Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities were selected from the sample of persons who completed the long questionnaire in the 2006 Census.

The survey focuses on Canada's official-language minorities, namely French-speaking persons outside Quebec and English-speaking persons in Quebec. The data can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the current situation of individuals belonging to these two groups on subjects as varied as education in the minority language, access to different services in the minority language (the health care sector in particular), language practices in daily activities both in the home and outside the home, and matters of linguistic identity.

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Notes

1. The number is 68,435 if all single and multiple responses mentioning French are included (see Table 3.7).
2. Includes all single responses and half of English and French responses.
3. This number includes all single and multiple responses mentioning French.
4. To cite only one example, in June 2009, the Ontario government adopted a new, inclusive definition of the Francophone population (IDF) (formerly defined according to the mother tongue criterion). This definition is fairly similar to the one based on first official language spoken, except that it also includes French-mother tongue persons who understand French but can no longer conduct a conversation in it.
5. In this report, the terms "Francophones," "French-speaking" and "Franco-Albertan" will be used interchangeably. Except when referring specifically to Francophones by the mother tongue criterion, this report uses the criterion of first official language spoken to designate the Francophone or French-speaking population. In this regard, the target population in this report differs slightly from the one in the report on the first results of the Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities – 2006 (Corbeil, Grenier and Lafrenière, 2007).
6. For information on the Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities, the reader is invited to visit the Statistics Canada website.