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Note: The language mentioned refers to the mother tongue (see below), unless otherwise specified.
The complex nature of Quebec's demolinguistic situation, with its often bilingual and trilingual population, has required the use of multiple methods in order to determine who speaks what language.
Mother tongue: The language spoken by the mother or the person responsible for taking care of the child is the most basic measure of a population's language. However, with the high number of mixed francophone-anglophone marriages and the reality of multilingualism in Montreal, this description does not give a true linguistic portrait of Quebec. It is, however, still essential, for example in order to calculate the assimilation rate . Statistics Canada defines mother tongue as the first language learned in childhood and still spoken; it does not presuppose literacy in that or any language.
Home language: This is the language most often spoken at home. This descriptor has the advantage of pointing out the current usage of languages. However, it fails to describe the language that is most used at work, which may be different.
Knowledge of official languages: This measure describes which of the two official languages of Canada a person can speak informally. This relies on the person's own evaluation of his/her linguistic competence and can prove misleading.
First official language spoken: This is a composite measure of mother tongue, home language and knowledge of official language.
Among the ten provinces of Canada and the 50 states of the United States, Quebec is the only jurisdiction whose majority is francophone. Quebec francophones account for 19.5% of the Canadian population and 90% of all of Canada's French-speaking population. Quebec is the only province whose francophone population is currently not declining. (See Demolinguistics of Canada).
The 8% of the Quebec population whose mother tongue is English resides mostly in the Greater Montreal Area, where they have a well-established network of educational, social, economic, and cultural institutions.
The remaining 10%, named allophone (literally "other-speaker") in Quebec, comprises some 30 different nationalities. With the exception of the aboriginal peoples ( Inuit, Huron, etc.), the majority are of 20th century immigration. There are 6.3% Italians, 2.9% Spanish speakers, 2.5% Arabs, 1.7% Chinese, 1.5% Greeks, 1.4% French Creoles, 1.1% Portuguese, 0.9% VietnameseThe Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a country in Southeast Asia. It borders China, Laos, Cambodia, and the Gulf of Tonkin. Cng Hoa Xa Hi Ch Nghia Vit Nam ( In Detail) (Full size) National motto: Dc lp, t do, hnh phuc (Independence, Liberty, Happiness Off, 0.8% PolishThe Republic of Poland a country in Central Europe, lies between Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Russia (in the form of the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave) t, and so on.
There are today two distinct territories in the Greater Montreal Area: the metropolitan region itself and Montreal Island, which has been coterminous with the City of MontrealMontreal (/mVn. tri"Al/ in English, /mO~. re"al/ in French) is the largest city in the province of Quebec, Canada, where it also constitutes an administrative region. It is Canada's second most populous city after Toronto ( Statistics Canada), and the sec between the municipal merger of 2002 and the "demerger" scheduled to occur in 2006.
Quebec allophones form 9% of the population of Quebec, but 88% of them are concentrated in the GMA. (Anglophones are also concentrated in a similar proportion.)
Francophones account for 67% of the total population of the Greater Montreal Area, anglophones 12.9% and allophones 17.6%. On the island of Montreal, the francophone majority drops to 52.8%, a net decline since the 1970s. The anglophones account for 18.2% of the population and the allophones 29.0%.