A Bilingual Region Between Two Increasingly Unilingual Solitudes
The bilingual belt is the frontier zone on either side of what Joy referred to as “Interior Quebec”—the heartland of the French language in North America, in which, in the 1961 census, “over 95% of the population gave French as their mother tongue and only 2% speak “English Only.” The bilingual belt is, therefore, the "region of contact" between the Quebec heartland in which French is the overwhelmingly predominant language and the rest of Canada, in which English is the overwhelmingly predominant language.
When the bilingual belt is added to the French language heartland of “Interior Quebec”, the result is:
| “ | an area 1,000 miles long, bounded on the West by a line drawn from Sault Ste. Marie through Ottawa to Cornwall and on the East by a line from Edmonston to Moncton....ver 90% of all Canadians who claimed to have a knowledge of the French language were found within the Soo-Moncton limits. Outside this area, not one person in twenty could speak French, and not one in forty would use it as the language of the home. | ” |
Joy recognized the continued (although diminished) existence of residual French-speaking communities in places like Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and Saint Boniface, Manitoba, but these communities were isolated and very small, and were, in his view, already well on the way to extinction, along with most of the smaller pockets of English-speakers within Quebec. For example, he had this to say about the French language in Manitoba: “The Franco-Manitobans have resisted assimilation more effectively than have the minorities in the other Western Provinces, but the 1961 Census reported only 6,341 children of French mother tongue, as against 12,337 of French origin. ... This could well indicate that the actual numbers, and not merely the relative strength, of those who retain the old language will soon start to fall.”
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