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On Wednesday, Statistics Canada will release the 2016 census results on the languages Canadians first learned (their mother tongue), the language(s) they speak at home and their knowledge of English and/or French.

Here’s a safe prediction, based on many years of observation: Some politicians, academics and pundits will state that mother-tongue francophones are becoming a minority, a plight they suggest will result in a doomsday scenario, the dominance of English.

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Such analyses, which tap into francophones’ insecurities about the future of the French language, generally have at least two serious flaws. They are based on the arbitrary (or not so arbitrary) selection of the Island of Montreal (as opposed to the Montreal region) as the place that will decide the fate of the French language. And they apply the term “minority” to the island’s francophone population, something that betrays a faulty assumption that the multiple language groups lumped together as “allophones” somehow combine with anglophones to form a majority, one united by its use of the English language and some presumed readiness to impose it on minority francophones. This in turn sparks fears that the island’s so-called minority francophones will no longer be able to get immigrants and their children to acquire the French language.