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The bilingual belt is a term for the portion of Canada where both French and English are regularly spoken. The term was coined by Richard Joy in his 1967 book ''Languages in Conflict'', where he wrote, "The language boundaries in Canada are hardening, with the consequent elimination of minorities everywhere except within a relatively narrow bilingual belt."〔Richard Joy, ''Languages in Conflict.'' Ottawa: Self-published, 1967, p. 21.〕 Joy's analysis of the 1961 census caused him to conclude, ==A bilingual region between two increasingly unilingual solitudes== The bilingual belt is the frontier zone on either side of what Joy referred to as “Interior Quebec”—the heartland of the French language in North America, in which, in the 1961 census, “over 95% of the population gave French as their mother tongue and only 2% speak “English Only.”〔 Richard Joy, ''Languages in Conflict.'' Ottawa: Self-published, 1967, p. 20.〕 The bilingual belt is, therefore, the "region of contact"〔"Region of contact" is a term used by Joy in his later book, ''Canada's Official Languages: The Progress of Bilingualism''. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. See p. 5, for example.〕 between the Quebec heartland in which French is the overwhelmingly predominant language and the rest of Canada, in which English is the overwhelmingly predominant language. When the bilingual belt is added to the French language heartland of “Interior Quebec”, the result is: Joy recognized the continued (although diminished) existence of residual French-speaking communities in places like Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and Saint Boniface, Manitoba, but these communities were isolated and very small, and were, in his view, already well on the way to extinction, along with most of the smaller pockets of English-speakers within Quebec. For example, he had this to say about the French language in Manitoba: “The Franco-Manitobans have resisted assimilation more effectively than have the minorities in the other Western Provinces, but the 1961 Census reported only 6,341 children of French mother tongue, as against 12,337 of French origin. ... This could well indicate that the actual numbers, and not merely the relative strength, of those who retain the old language will soon start to fall.”〔Richard Joy, ''Languages in Conflict.'' Ottawa: Self-published, 1967, pp. 126-127.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「bilingual belt」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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