OTTAWA - The French language remains dominant in Quebec, with four out of five people speaking it regularly at home despite a rising rate of bilingualism, according to new 2011 census data released Wednesday by Statistics Canada.

The data also revealed that 94.4 per cent of the Quebec population - 7.38 million people - said they could carry on a conversation in French, slightly down from 94.5 per cent in 2011. But it was an increase from about 7.03 million people in 2006.

The numbers also show a slight decrease in the proportion of Quebec residents who said their first language was French at 78.9 per cent in 2011, versus 79.6 per cent in 2006.

While the French language was steady, the proportion of Quebec residents who are bilingual in both official languages grew to 3.33 million in 2011. This represented an increase in the proportion of bilingual residents from 40.6 to 42.6 per cent, led by teenagers and young adults.

Quebec residents aged 20 to 24 were the most bilingual group in the country in English and French at a rate of 60.5 per cent in 2011.

At the same time, the number of anglophones grew by more than 40,000, from 8.2 per cent of the population in 2006 up to 8.3 per cent in 2011. But Statistics Canada said this increase was partly due to census responses that allowed people to report multiple languages as a mother tongue.

The data also suggested that the clout of official languages in the province, and Montreal, its largest city, was changing due to immigration that has reduced the proportion of English- and French-speaking households from 62.4 per cent of the population in 2001 down to 56.5 per cent in 2011.

Arabic was the top immigrant language in Montreal, spoken by 108,000 people, followed by Spanish with 95,000 people and Italian with 50,500 people.

Chinese languages and Creole were next, spoken by about 35,000 and 34,000 Montrealers, respectively.

The data also revealed that a growing number of immigrants who didn't speak English were becoming bilingual by learning French.

In fact, the fastest-growing language group in the province was made up of Quebecers that spoke French and another language that was not English, rising from 3.8 per cent of the population in 2006 up to five per cent in 2011.