In 2021, French was the first language spoken by over 71 percent of the population of Montréal, Québec in Canada. 20.4 percent of the city's residents had English as their first language, 6.7 percent used both English and French as their primary language, and 1.6 percent of the population spoke another language. That same year, 46.4 percent of people living in the province of Québec could speak both English and French.

According to the Canadian government, approximately 2.54 million people residing in Montreal, in the province of Quebec, had French as their mother tongue in 2021. About 474,730 of them had English, the second official language, as their birth language. However, there were more people that year ( 522,255) whose mother tongue was an Indo-European language, such as German, Russian or Polish.

In 2021, most of the population of the city of Montreal, located in the Canadian province of Quebec, could speak both English and French. In fact, approximately 1.23 million men and 1.68 million women were bilingual. Of those who spoke only one of the official languages, the majority (1.43 million people) spoke only French. In addition, more than 68,400 people did not know either language, with women outnumbering men.

Over the past fifty years, the proportion of Quebecers speaking both English and French has increased steadily, from 27.6 percent in 1971 to almost half the population (46.4 percent) in 2021. The rate of English-French bilingualism, on the other hand, has declined in the rest of the country: outside Quebec, just over ten percent of people were bilingual in English and French in 2001, compared to 9.5 percent two decades later.

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This paper investigates the influence of the relative size of speech communities on language use in multilingual regions and cities. Due to peoples’ everyday mobility inside a city, it is still unclear whether the size of a population matters for language use on a sub-city scale. By testing the correlation between the size of a population and language use on various spatial scales, this study will contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which sociodemographic factors influence language use. The present study investigates two particular phenomena that are common to multilingual speakers, namely language mixing or Code-Switching and using multiple languages without mixing. Demographic information from a Canadian census will make predictions about the intensity of Code-Switching and language use by multilinguals in cities of Quebec and neighborhoods of Montreal. Geolocated tweets will be used to identify where these linguistic phenomena occur the most and the least. My results show that the intensity of Code-Switching and the use of English by bilinguals is influenced by the size of anglophone and francophone populations on various spatial scales such as the city level, land use level (city center vs. periphery of Montreal), and large urban zones on the sub-city level, namely the western and eastern urban zones of Montreal. However, the correlation between population figures and language use is difficult to measure and evaluate on a much smaller sub-urban scale such as the city block scale due to factors such as population figures missing from the census and people’s mobility. A qualitative evaluation of language use on a small spatial scale seems to suggest that other social influences such as the location context or topic of discussion are much more important predictors for language use than population figures. Methods will be suggested for testing this hypothesis in future research. I conclude that geographic space can provide us information about the relation between language use in multilingual cities and sociodemographic factors such as a speech community’s size and that social media is a valuable alternative data source for sociolinguistic research that offers new insights into the mechanisms of language use such as Code-Switching.