Abstracts Sociology

French and English in the institutional structure of Montreal : a study for the social and economic division of labour.

by Stuart Marshall. Jamieson

The survival of the French Canadians as a distinct ethnic group in the midst of a much larger and more pervasive English-speaking society is, in many ways, usique in the history of race and culture contact. Numbering some 60,000 at the time of the British conquest of Canada in 1163, the French, by virtue of a high rate of natural increase, have grown to almost 3,000,000 in this country. The traditions and customs peculiar to French Canada center around the most cherished elements of its culture: the French language and the Catholic religion. These, in contrast to English Protestantism, are the main distinguishing factors between the two major ethnic groups in the Province of Quebec. Essentialy local and personal, and wedded to the soil, the traditional French Canadian culture, while protected by constitutional guarantees, developed and expanded in a state of comparative isolation. During the last few decades, however, secular conditions essential to the maintenance of cultural separateness have been disappearing steadily. Economic expansion, spreading from technically more advanced societies to undeveloped regions, has been the universal agent of culture contact and concentration of population in large urban centres. [...]