Applied Languages

Forty years after Canada adopted an official languages law, Canadians remain divided about bilingualism, according to a new public opinion poll.

While 59% believe bilingualism is a success that Canadians can take pride in, that varies widely across the country. Those in Eastern Canada generally support bilingualism, but those in the Prairie provinces don’t believe that bilingualism has been a successful, proud Canadian tradition.

Nowhere is the judgment on bilingualism harsher than in Alberta, where a majority disagree that bilingualism has been a success and 44% strongly disagree.

The public opinion poll, conducted by Leger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies and released exclusively to Sun Media, found those in Atlantic Canada, Quebec and Ontario were most likely to feel bilingualism has been a success. “That has been the challenge from the start for the (official languages) policy, selling the policy west of Ontario,” said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the association.

Whether or not you agree bilingualism has been a success also varies with age and mother tongue. Younger respondents and francophones were more likely to think bilingualism has been a success than were older respondents and anglophones.

The poll, released to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the introduction of Canada’s Official Languages Act, also examined the perceptions — and misperceptions — that Canadians have about the country’s official languages law.

One of the biggest misperceptions was that you have to be bilingual in order to work for the federal government. While 61% of respondents believe that, in fact 60% of federal government positions only require knowledge of one official language. In the National Capital region 65% of positions are designated bilingual, but only 5% of federal jobs in Western Canada and 10% of jobs in the rest of Ontario require both languages.

Jedwab said the poll shows Canadians often don’t understand the asymmetrical nature of the language policy. For example, 77% believe all federal services have to be offered in both languages across the country when, in reality, bilingual services are only offered where there is significant demand.

The poll found 92% of Quebecers believed services must be available in both languages compared to 54.6% of Albertans. In Ontario, the rate was 73.9%. The poll is based on a web-based survey of 1,366 respondents during the week of Aug. 17 and is considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Read more: The London Free Press

The UK will be held back as it seeks to emerge from recession unless it boosts the number of language graduates, campaigners say. The National Centre for Languages (Cilt) points to a worrying decline in the take-up of modern languages. It wants languages to be treated as strategically significant subjects in the same way that science and maths have been championed.

The government said a review of modern languages was currently under way. Cilt chief executive Kathryn Board said: “English is one of the great global languages but it will only take us so far. Our engagement with the non-English speaking world will remain superficial and one-sided unless we develop our capacity in other languages.”

Recent research from Cardiff Business School suggests improving languages could add an extra £21bn to the UK economy and that export businesses that use language skills boost their sales by 45%.

Cilt’s director of communications Teresa Tinsley said there was a lot of concern that not enough youngsters were taking languages in secondary schools through to university. In 1997, 71% of England’s GCSE pupils took a foreign language, last year the rate was down to 44%. For the most popular foreign languages at GCSE, French and German, take-up declined in England by 45% and 46% respectively between 1997 and 2008.

Whilst at university, the share of home UK students taking modern languages has fallen by 4% since 2002. This happened against a 4.5% increase in the overall numbers of students. Cilt says this decline comes after an even bigger fall in language student numbers in the 1990s.
Ms Tinsley said: “We are going to be held back as a nation as we seek to emerge from the economic downturn or recession. Companies are looking to recruit people with language skills and if they can’t find them amongst our home-grown graduates they will obviously bring in people from other countries to fill these gaps. We really need to buck up our ideas or we are going to be stuck in a mono-lingual world when everybody else is taking global opportunities.”

Language courses at some universities are struggling. The University of the West of England is to stop courses in French, Spanish and Chinese this year because they received only 39 applicants. And Queen’s University Belfast is planning to close its German department.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills said it recognised the value of learning a language for personal development and for people’s future careers. “This is why the government will make language teaching compulsory in primary schools from next year.”

She said the government had expanded a scheme into a national programme encouraging universities and schools to work together to increase language take-up. It was also working with the higher education funding council for England on their review of modern languages and strategically important and vulnerable subjects and would continue to do so.

Read more: BBC News