Population and Politics in a Plural Society: The Changing Geography of Canada's Linguistic Groups

Abstract

Population change is of fundamental significance to many human geographical phenomena, especially in culturally plural societies. This paper examines the role of population change as it reflects and shapes the political and cultural relations between French and English speakers in Canada. These two groups have inhabited the same country for more than 200 years but are concentrated in different regions. Presently, Canadians must decide whether Canada should grant greater authority to regional majorities–French speakers in Quebec and English speakers throughout the rest of Canada–or promote spatial intermingling and the preservation of linguistic minority populations. I argue that these questions are conditioned by the linguistic landscape and by the nature and direction of population change. The analysis demonstrates that linguistic affiliation determines one's propensity to remain within a region and guides the choice of destinations, resulting in linguistically differentiated migration fields. The linguistic environment, in turn, affects linguistic retention and makes the retention of French especially difficult in English-majority regions. Population projections indicate a precipitous decline in the English presence within Quebec and a continued containment of the French presence to Quebec and two buffer regions just outside Quebec. Trends in population geography thus will reinforce the bifurcation of Canada into unilingual French-and English-speaking regions and will strengthen the position of partisans who wish to grant more power to regional majorities.

Key Words:

• population geography
• Canada
• language
• ethnicity
• nationalism
• multi-regional demography
• migration
• regional life expectancies