ABSTRACT
English and French are Canada's two official languages. French is concentrated in Québec and English in the rest of Canada. There are also approximately one million French speakers living outside Québec and the equivalent number of English speakers living in Québec. The future of the French language outside Québec is rather bleak. Rates of assimilation in some parts of the country are as high as 75 percent; English speakers living in Québec do not, for their part, experience language loss. In addition, the percentage of Canadians able to speak in the other official language is not all that it could be. According to the 2001 census data, only 17.7 percent of Canadians can conduct a conversation in both official languages. In comparison with other countries, Canadians are less bilingual than even the British (24.8 percent). 1 In contrast, bilingualism is on the rise in Europe and in the United States while Canada is lagging behind. 2 Moreover, a recent study showed that English was still the working language in federal offices in Montreal, to the detriment of French. 3
