The status of the French language in British North America: from the conquest to the confederation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Act of Union established English as the only official language of the legislature and of legislative documents. The Act of Union was comprised of 62 sections and over 10,000 words, yet the words “English” and “translated” are mentioned only once each. Although the Act seriously undermines the linguistic rights of French Canadians, the word “French” is nowhere to be found. This article examines the linguistic situation of French Canadians after the Conquest of Canada by British forces in 1760. Firstly, a short history of the linguistic situation in Canada will be provided, followed by an analysis of the status of the French language in the various constitutional acts which affected the governing and the use of the French language in the territory known as Quebec. The focus will specifically be on the period surrounding the Act of Union , since the linguistic situation of French Canadians changed drastically thereafter. Second, the linguistic policies put forward by the British Crown about the use of French in Lower Canada will also be examined. What was the status of the French language as a non-official language of the United Province of Canada? What were the linguistic barriers encountered by monolingual French speakers in Lower Canada? Therefore, one of the important aspects of this article is to examine the historical access (or non-access) of French Canadians to language facilities when they needed to interact with anglophone government institutions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".