Language demographics of Quebec

This article presents the current language demographics of the Canadian province of Quebec.

The complex nature of Quebec's linguistic situation, with individuals who are often bilingual or multilingual, requires the use of multiple terms in order to describe the languages which people speak.

Among the ten provinces of Canada, Quebec is the only one whose majority is francophone. Quebec's population accounts for 23.9% of the Canadian population, and Quebec's francophones account for at least 90% of all of Canada's French-speaking population.

English-speaking Quebecers are a large population in the Greater Montreal Area, where they have built a well-established network of educational, social, economic, and cultural institutions. There are also historical English-speaking communities in the Eastern Townships, the Ottawa Valley, the Laurentians such as Ste. Agathe des Monts, Ste. Adolphe de Howard, Arundel, Lachute, Mont Tremblant and many other Laurentian communities built up by French farmers selling their land to vacationing anglophones who now retire there in droves and the Gaspé Peninsula. By contrast, the province's second-largest city Quebec City is almost exclusively francophone. The absolute number and the share of native English speakers has dropped significantly during the past fifty years (from 13.8% in 1951 to just 8% in 2001).

The remaining 10% of the population, known as allophones, comprises more than 30 different linguistic/ethnic groupings. With the exception of Aboriginal peoples in Quebec (the Inuit, Huron,Mohawks, Iroquois, Abenaki, Montagnais, Cree, Innu, Ojibway etc.), the majority are products of 20th-century immigration and eventually adopt either English or French as home languages.

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