Does the perception of the history of Canada vary according to the mother tongue? This is revealed by the work of two researchers who asked Canadians to summarize, in their own words, the national story. For several Francophones, Canada is above all a country of duality; For many English speakers, he rather embodies diversity.
On June 24, Dialogue collected near the Mont-Royal Metro your words to describe Quebec1. The exercise was inspired by Jocelyn Létourneau and Raphaël Gani, researchers from Laval University, who carried out a survey in April 2025 with Quebecers. The question posed to them: “If you had to summarize in a few sentences the history of Canada until today, what would you write?” »»
The results, that The press has obtained and analyzed, show that two solitudes emerge among respondents.
In fact, when you examine the pairs of words, which are often more revealing of the meaning of a text than the words alone, we see that the expression Founder (s) is very often used by French speakers, while it is absent from English speakers. These use expression British (and) Frenchbut only in sentences where it is also a question of natives.
For example, a respondent summarized Canada as well (in English): “Indigenous peoples lived here before the British and the French arrive. »»
« L’expression founding peoples refers to the idea of duality, central to the Quebec vision of Canada, ”underlines Jocelyn Létourneau. The rest of Canada puts more emphasis on diversity: “This does not mean that we do not recognize the French fact,” he says. It is simply considered to enrich Canadian diversity. »»
First Nations not first everywhere
That said, both French speakers and English speakers include natives in their descriptions of Canadian history. But these are more often found in English answers. The expression indigenous people is even the most frequently used pair of words, by far, in English responses.
It should not necessarily conclude that French speakers are less sensitive to the first nations. When we examine the verbs, we observe that take arrives high enough. It comes from answers in French like this: “We took the land of the Aboriginal people. »The presence of the verb colonize also reflects the colonization of French Canadians like that of the First Nations.
Language: central element
Words French et Englishboth as names and as adjectives, arrive very high in the list of words most used by participants in the survey.
Surprisingly, even English speakers use the word French more often than the word English ! So there is unanimity that the French language, not simply the language in general, is an essential component of Canada.
This fascinating work on history, and what we remember, combines the research fields of these two teachers of the Laval universitity. Jocelyn Létourneau is in the Department of Historical Sciences. He is particularly interested in the construction of collective imaginations. Raphaël Gani is attached to the Department of Education and Learning Studies. This survey reveals how history is integrated, then reinterpreted by citizens.
The two teachers just published, in May 2025, Nation’s wordswork based on another survey, gigantic this one, carried out in 2011 with 5,276 respondents in six regions of the world.
Their 2025 survey is a continuation of the results obtained in 2011, writes Raphaël Gani: “A binary story centered on two founding peoples, where French speakers are represented as constantly threatened with erasure by English speakers, and nevertheless resilient. [Il] Continue to rely on an image of the oppressed, but combative Quebecer. Some emerging themes-immigration, Aboriginal, United States-to qualify this frame, without however dislodging the dominant structure. »»
“Magnificent losers”
Jocelyn Létourneau likes to describe Canada as a country of “magnificent losers”, a formula he borrowed from Leonard Cohen. “Indigenous, French Canadians and English Canadians [ont réussi] To settle in duration despite their respective failure to impose themselves or develop as they would have liked, ”he writes to us.
The history of Canada is thus a succession of “fortunately unfinished” conquests, he continues: “that of the (aborted) reduction of the first peoples and the Métis, that of (missed) provincialization of French speakers”, in particular. “This is perhaps the essential of what the country is from which we have to enhance history and memory to go to the future. »»
Methodology
The researchers asked the light firm to carry out an online survey from 1015 Quebecers randomly selected in the panel of the firm. The survey was carried out from April 3 to 7, 2025. If the survey was probabilistic, its margin of error would be 3.1 %, 19 times out of 20.
The press made an analysis of the responses (more than 21,000 words) using French and English models of the spacy module of the Python programming language. We have notably entrenched tool words, such as determinants (“le”, “de”, etc.), prepositions (“in”, “with”, etc.) and coordination conjunctions (“and”, “or”, etc.).
1. Read the text “For me, Quebec is …”
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