Article content

Say “Bonjour-Hi” to an increasingly bilingual Quebec.

Forty-five per cent of Quebecers can now speak both English and French — up from 42.6 per cent in 2011, according to the 2016 Census.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Census 2016: English is making gains in Quebec Back to video

The growth in bilingualism among Quebecers drove the proportion of Canadians who master both official languages to a historic high of 18 per cent, show Census results on language released Wednesday.

The Census also shows strong growth for Quebec’s English-speaking minority, with nearly one Quebecer in five now speaking English at home at least some of the time.

Quebec gained 74,000 residents whose first language is English from 2011 to 2016, pushing the growth rate for mother-tongue English-speakers to 10.6 per cent — triple the growth rate for Quebec’s population as a whole, noted Jean-Pierre Corbeil, an assistant director at Statistics Canada.

Quebec’s 774,390 mother-tongue anglophones now represent 9.6 per cent of the population, up from 9 per cent in 2011.