Bilingual Belt - Regions Within The Bilingual Belt

Regions Within The Bilingual Belt

Strictly speaking, the bilingual belt has never been a single contiguous region. Instead, the parts of the bilingual belt lying within Ontario and west Quebec form one geographical unit, and the part in northern New Brunswick formed a separate geographical unit. Joy also noted that there was considerable demographic variation within the bilingual belt itself, based on such factors as proximity to the unilingual French-speaking heartland of “Interior Quebec” and the ratio in any particular part of the bilingual belt of native French-speakers to native English-speakers. He summarized these regional divisions as follows:

- In New Brunswick: In seven counties in the province’s north and north-east, French was the mother tongue of 59% of the population. Joy indicated that in this region, rates of bilingualism were high among francophones but that French “is spoken by practically none” of the Anglophones in this part of the bilingual belt.

- In Quebec: Joy pointed to a strip of territory running from the Eastern Townships westward through Montreal to Pontiac County. In this region, French was the mother tongue of 70% of the population, and English of the remaining 30%. The rates of bilingualism were 40% for persons with French as their mother tongue, and “less than a third” for persons with English as their mother tongue.

- In Ontario: This part of the bilingual belt consisted of “the eleven counties which form a band, along the Quebec border, running from the St. Lawrence River to the Upper Lakes”. Joy reported that in this region, French was the mother tongue of 30% of the population, and that fewer than one quarter of persons of French descent had been assimilated.