Canada has two official languages, English and French. In 2006, about 17.4% of the population were bilingual, as they were able to conduct a conversation in both official languages. People living in Quebec reported the highest percentage of being bilingual. New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province in Canada, had the highest bilingualism rate among Anglophones (16.0%) outside Quebec. People living in Eastern Ontario and in the Greater Sudbury area also reported a higher rate of bilingualism compared to the other parts of Canada. For the rest of Canada, the rate of bilingualism varied among the provinces and territories. In some regions, the rate of bilingualism reached as high as 15%.

About 5 231 500 people reported to the 2001 Census that they were bilingual, compared with 4 841 300 five years earlier, an 8.1% increase. In 2001, these individuals represented 17.7% of the population, up from 17.0% in 1996. Nationally, 43.4% of francophones reported that they were bilingual, compared with 9.0% of anglophones. Within Quebec, the growth in the bilingualism rate from 1996 to 2001 was even greater than in the previous five-year period. In 2001, two out of every five individuals (40.8%) reported that they were bilingual, compared with 37.8% in 1996 and 35.4% in 1991.

Project Description

The Paradis corpus consists of naturalistic language samples from 25 children learning English as a second language (English language learners or learners of English as an additional language). Transcription is in English orthography only; phonetic transcription was not included in this research. Any real names of people or places in the transcripts have been replaced with pseudonyms. The participants are identified with four letter codes.

Content

The data in this corpus was collected in 2002 in Edmonton, Canada. Children were video-‐taped in conversation with a student research assistant in their homes for approximately 45 minutes. During this time, the research assistant had a list of “interview” questions to ask. If the child introduced his or her own topics and the conversation moved forward, the questions were not asked. This dataset only includes data from the first stage of data collection, in 2002. The full longituinal corpus may be found on the CHILDES website, here: http://childes.talkbank.org/access/Biling/Paradis.html

These data are in .cha files, which are intended for use with the program CLAN (http://alpha.talkbank.org/clan/). However, you may also treat these files as raw text files, with one speech snippet per line. Lines starting with @ are metadata.

File format information:

• *EXP: Experimenter speaking
• *CHI: Child speaking
• %[some text]: These lines contain non-linguistic information

Biographical data

Participants in this study were children from newcomer (immigrant and refugee) families to Canada. The children started to learn English as a second language (L2) after their first language (L1) had been established, at 4 years 11 months on average. In the table below, “AOA” refers to the “age of arrival” of the child when the family immigrated. The number “1” indicates children who were Canadian born. The column “AOE” refers to the age of onset of English acquisition. All ages are in months. Each child’ s L1 and gender is also listed in the table below.

For more information about the participants and procedures in this research, see the following:

Paradis, J. (2005). Grammatical morphology in children learning English as a second language: Implications of similarities with Specific Language Impairment. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools, 36, 172-187. Golberg, H., Paradis, J. & Crago, M. (2008). Lexical acquisition over time in minority L1 children learning English as a L2. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 1-25.

Inspiration:

• Does children’s first language affect what English words they use? How many words?
• Do some children pause (marked as (.) or (..)) more often than others?
• Do children at different ages interrupt/overlap their speech more often? (Marked by <> around text.)
• Does a children’s age of first exposure to English affect how often then say “um”? (Transcribed as“&-um”.)

Related datasets:

• When do children learn words?
• Diagnosing specing language impairment in children

The Public Service Official Languages Exclusion Approval Order sets out the situations whereby, for non-imperative appointments, public servants may be exempted from the obligation of meeting the official language requirements of their bilingual positions within a specific timeline. On a yearly basis, deputy heads of federal departments and agencies governed by the Public Service Employment Act must report to the Public Service Commission of Canada on the use of the order and the Public Service Official Languages Appointment Regulations. As a result of the reporting from deputy heads, cases of employees who do not meet the language requirements of their bilingual positions within the timelines are identified as non-compliant. The Public Service Commission supports organizations in resolving these situations. Overall, the management of exclusions provided by the order has considerably improved from year to year and results have stabilized in the last few years. This decrease in the number of non-compliant cases is attributable to a number of factors: these cases have been monitored more closely by organizations, and the number of non-imperative appointments, which are a prerequisite for people to be excluded, has also decreased. The Public Service Commission follows up with departments and agencies on situations that have reached the end of the maximum period prescribed by the order to ensure that incumbents obtain second language evaluation results that correspond to the linguistic profile of the position and meet merit with respect to official language proficiency.

Contained within the Atlas of Canada's Reference Map Series, 1961 to 2010, is a bilingual map is part of the Canada Base Map Series. It shows national, provincial and territorial boundaries. Data on the map sheet is restricted to populated places and drainage features. The very extensive set of populated places shows their population (using 1981 Census data). The drainage network corresponds to the ""full drainage"" network used for most National Atlas of Canada, 5th Edition maps. The Canadian land mass is all in white, whereas foreign land areas are in grey.

The Canada Communicable Disease Report is a bilingual, open-access, peer-reviewed journal on the prevention and control of emerging and persistent infectious diseases.