The politics of numbers: Quebec’s historical struggle with ethnic and linguistic categories^*

* This is an abridged and updated version of Piché (2015).

ABSTRACT

The production of indicators is intimately linked to the political context and therefore meets a social demand based on historical issues. Quebec is no exception. The use of official ethnic and linguistic categories has evolved from a purely ethnic perspective based on ethnic ancestry aimed at assessing the demographic balance between French and English (1860–1960) to linguistic categories with a strong ethnic content defined by mother tongue and language spoken at home (1960–1990). In the more recent period (since the 1990s), the official linguistic policy in an increasing diversified population aimed at favouring the use of French as the common language in the public sphere. Clearly, mother tongue and language spoken at home do not meet the public sphere criteria. My main argument here is that language monitoring today should be a policy-related issue and therefore aimed at measuring the evolution of the French language in the public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic and linguistic categories
• immigration
• nationalism
• integration
• Quebec
• Canada

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* This is an abridged and updated version of Piché (2015).

1 For a recent historical synthesis of the links between politics and language in Canada and Quebec, see Martel and Pâquet (2010).

2 For an excellent study of Quebec’s immigration policy in a comparative perspective with other provinces, see Paquet (2016).

3 See Juteau (2015) for a discussion on pluralism and the ambiguity of Quebec citizenship.