Cow-boy poétré: a Bilingual Performance for a Unilingual Audience

Abstract

The two official languages of Canada have been historically confined to two linguistic territories, often referred to as the ‘two solitudes’,¹ with Francophones in the East, mostly in Quebec, and Anglophones in the centre and western parts of the country. According to statistics compiled by Canada’s national statistical agency in 2006,² unilingual Anglophones make up 67.61 per cent of the population, while another 13.24 per cent consists of unilingual Francophones, residing for the most part in Quebec. The remaining 17.45 per cent of the population is bilingual, mostly Francophone, and is dispersed throughout the country, with approximately 2.17 per cent of them in the four provinces of Western Canada: Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. In these relatively small communities, far from the French centres in the East, bilingualism is a necessity of daily life for Francophones inasmuch as public exchange takes place exclusively in English, while French is confined to the private sphere, or to activities of the very few francophone cultural and educational organizations.