Bilingualism in Montreal: A Demographic Analysis

Census data and indexes adopted from linguistics are used to examine trends in the ability of Montreal's population to communicate with one another between 1921 and 1961. There has been no increase in linguistic communication during this period. The probabilities of members sharing a mutually intelligible tongue within the British and French ethnic groups remaing far higher than the probability of linguistic communication between the groups. Bilingualism appears to be an end product of language contact rather than an intermediate step toward monolingualism. Both major languages maintain their positions in intergenerational transfer. Cohort analysis discloses relatively low degrees of bilingualism among small children, a rapid rise during the school and young adult ages, and an actual net decline during the middle and older ages.