Portrait of official-language minorities in Canada : Portrait des minorités de langue officielle au Canada : les anglophones du Québec

A number of considerations lay behind the creation of the concept of “first official language spoken.” Firstly, the substantial increase in immigration 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). [...] In fact, approximately half of Quebec’s Anglophones (52% or 515,000 persons) comprise between 30% and 49.9% of the population of the municipality in which they live, and 200,000 of the province’s Anglophones, or 20% of the total, live in municipalities in which they constitute the majority. [...] In the East of Quebec region, which accounts for less than 2% of the province’s Anglophones, 45% of Anglo Quebecers live in a municipality where they form the majority of the population, a proportion slightly higher than what is observed in the “Rest of the Province,” namely 37%. [...] The tendency to transmit a language to one’s children varies according to a number of factors, and one of the most important of these is the geographic concentration of the population consisting of a given language group. [...] This means that when the mother tongue of the mother is French and that of her spouse is English, French is transmitted to the children as the sole mother tongue in 67% of cases, whereas when the mother tongue of the father is French and that of his spouse is English, French is transmitted in a proportion similar to English, at approximately 45%.