Abstract
We characterise how the assimilation patterns of minorities into the strong and the weak language differ in a situation of asymmetric bilingualism. Using large variations in language composition in Canadian cities from the 2001 and 2006 Censuses, we show that the differences in the knowledge of English by immigrant allophones (i.e., the immigrants with a mother tongue other than English and French) in English-majority cities are mainly due to sorting across cities. Instead, in French-majority cities, learning plays an important role in explaining differences in knowledge of French. In addition, the presence of large anglophone minorities deters much more the assimilation into French than the presence of francophone minorities deters the assimilation into English. Finally, we find that language distance plays a much more important role in explaining assimilation into French, and that assimilation into French is much more sensitive to individual characteristics than assimilation into English. Some of these asymmetric assimilation patterns extend to anglophone and francophone immigrants, but no evidence of learning is found in this case.
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Notes
“The major point about bilingualism (...) is that maintained group bilingualism is unusual. The norm for groups in prolonged contact with a nation-state is for subordinate group to shift to the language of the dominant group.” (Paulston 2003, p. 401)
There is also a theoretical literature explaining why the incentives for learning the weak and the dominant language differ, see John and Yi (2001) and Church and King (1993). Other empirical papers studying multilingual set-ups include Cattaneo and Winkelmann (2005), Rendon (2007), or Kraus (2011).
These data are from the 2006 Census 100 % tabulations, www12.statcan.ca.
The legal history of Canada contains examples of legislation aimed at favoring assimilation of immigrants or minorities in a particular language. For instance, after the British North America Act (1867) established the provincial responsibility over education, the corresponding provincial educational acts (except in the cases of Quebec and Ontario) “banned the use of French as a medium of instruction in the system of public schools and/or abolished the provision of financial support to Catholic [French-speaking] schools” (Mougeon 1998, p. 227). More recently, Bill 101 of Quebec (1977) stated that “only children whose father or mother received most of their primary education in English, in Quebec, have access to English schools” (Barbaud 1998, p. 185). While the children of immigrants in Quebec can still only attend schools in French, the Canada Constitution Act (1982) partly overturned Bill 101 by establishing the right for Canadian citizens whose mother tongue is English or French to get education in that same language everywhere in Canada (when the number of children so warrants). The defense of French has been used as a central argument in favor of the secession of Quebec in the 1980 and 1995 referenda.
Corresponding to 2.7 % samples of the Census populations.
From our definition of minority, individuals having several mother tongues are not included in the city minority if one of their mother tongues is the city majority language.
We restrict our attention to individuals living in CMAs because the city of residence for individuals living in smaller cities is not available in the PUMFs. In 2006, according to the 100 % Census tabulations, CMAs accounted for 66.98 % of the Canadian population.
The largest allophone group was the same in 2001 in 18 out of the 23 CMAs under consideration. The five exceptions are Winnipeg (from German in 2001 to Filipino in 2006), London (from Polish to Spanish), Oshawa (from Polish to Italian), Toronto (from Italian to Chinese), and Victoria (from German to Chinese).
The proportions are not reported for 2001. Overall, assimilation was lower in 2001 than in 2006 for both types of cities, particularly for English-majority cities. Within English-majority cities, assimilation generally went up between the two dates in Ontario and instead fell in Alberta and British Columbia.
For some cities, the proportion of individuals declaring to use the language at work is larger than the proportion declaring to speak the language, but this is simply due to the fact that the latter proportion is computed only for the individuals who have a job.
Clearly, it might be the case that employment status—or, more generally, labour market status—is partly determined by language knowledge. In order to reduce this potential reverse causality problem, Section 6 presents regressions where the sample is restricted to those individuals employed in occupations where the use of the language is below the median.
As employment status, marital status could also be—at least partly—determined by language knowledge.
Individuals who declare to have several mother tongues belong to more than one network, and for this reason, the measure of the total population of the city used to construct these proportions counts bilingual individuals twice. These variables were obtained from the 100 % Census tabulations in order to avoid sampling errors. This information is available at http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01 and http://census2006.ca.
The 2006 Census allows to identify the immigrants that have been in Canada for 4 months or less. However, the number of observations for allophones available in the PUMF is very small, with only three cities—Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal—having more than 35 observations. Table 13 in the appendix shows that while for Montreal the proportion of newly arrived allophones speaking English is actually a little bit higher than the proportion of allophones speaking French, over 70 % of the newly arrived allophones into Vancouver or Toronto speak English, while less than 4 % of them speak French.
See the Data Appendix for the details of that classification.
We are grateful to a referee for pointing out this limitation of our analysis.
Because of data constraints, the sample includes only the allophones for which the variable “Proportion of own mother tongue” can be computed, namely the individuals whose mother tongue is Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Spanish, Russian, or Ukrainian.
French mother-tongue immigrants account for 1 % of the immigrants in anglophone cities and English mother-tongue immigrants account for 10 % of immigrants in francophone cities.
We do not estimate these regressions for French cities as the number of observations is insufficient for all French-majority cities but Montreal.
See also Isphording and Otten (2014) for an alternative definition of language distance.
Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian.
Arabic, Dutch, Chinese, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
To this purpose, the level (resp. the importance) of the skill “speaking” for each of the 25 occupations available in the PUMF data is obtained by averaging the level (resp. the importance) of the occupations in the detailed—more than 900—O*NET classification who have the same general title. So for instance, the value for “manager” is an average of the value for “training managers,” “public relations manager,” “sales manager,” etc. The detailed matching can be obtained from the authors upon request.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank two anonymous referees, the editor (Klaus Zimmermann), Jan Fidrmuc, Alex Lembcke, Barbara Petrongolo, and seminar participants at the CREAM-TARGET Conference on Immigration (UCL), Universidad de Oviedo, EEA, CEP (LSE), Brunel, City University London, and WPEG for interesting comments. Funding from CEPREMAP’s Programme Travail is gratefully acknowledged.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Data Appendix
Level of education: The 2006 Census provides more categories than the 2001 Census for the highest degree attained by those individuals with education levels above high-school and below a bachelor’s degree. However, using two broad intermediate categories—some college and college—renders the information in the two censuses comparable. Specifically, “some college” corresponds to “Trade certificate or diploma” in 2001 and to both “other trade certificate or diploma” and “registered apprenticeship certificate” in 2006. Similarly, “college” corresponds to both “college certificate or diploma” and “university certificate or diploma below bachelor level” in 2001, and to “university certificate or diploma below bachelor level” and three college sub-categories depending on the length of college in the 2006 Census.
Location of education: The variable (“locstud”) in the 2006 Census reports (i) for those individuals who took education in Canada, the Canadian province where the highest degree was obtained, and (ii) for those individuals who took education abroad, whether the highest degree was taken in the USA or in one of four very broad regions including many countries which are not homogeneous in terms of language of instruction. With this information, three locations of education can be distinguished for an individual: education abroad excluding the USA, education in a province with the same language majority as the province of residence (including the USA for English-majority cities) and education in a province with a language majority different from that of the province of residence (including the USA for French-majority cities).
List of countries where English (or French) is used as a lingua franca: We include countries where English (or French) are spoken by at least 20 % of the population as a lingua franca or where a creole version of the language is spoken by at least 70 % of the population. We do not include countries where a majority of the population speaks the language as a mother tongue, as the individuals coming from these countries are likely to declare that English (or French) is their mother tongue and therefore will not be appear in the sample as allophones. With these criteria, the countries where French is consider to be a familiar language are Algeria, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Haiti, Lebanon, Mauritius, Morocco, Saint Lucia, Senegal, Switzerland, Togo, and Tunisia. For English, the countries are: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Brunei, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Dominica, Fiji, Grenada, Guyana, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Kiribati, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Lesotho, Liberia, Nauru, Nigeria, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Suriname, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Vanuatu, and Zimbabwe.
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Ortega, J., Verdugo, G. Assimilation in multilingual cities. J Popul Econ 28, 785–815 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-015-0549-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-015-0549-9