INTRODUCTION

New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada. Its French-speaking minority is the second largest, in absolute numbers, in a Canadian province (250,175 compared to 547,300 in Ontario), but it is by far the most important in terms of its proportion of the provincial population (34.6 per cent compared to 5.4 per cent for the Franco-Ontarians). As a group, New Brunswick francophones meet the four basic criteria identified by Allardt (1984) for the existence of a language minority: self-ascription or categorization by others as members of the group exists, an important majority of the group members are bound to the group by descent or ancestry, the language minority has some distinctive attributes (linguistic, cultural or historical traits) related to language and, finally, there is a structure of social interaction which allows the persistence of cultural differences.

Francophones have been present on the territory known from 1604 to 1710 as Acadie, then as Nova Scotia (1713 to 1783), and on which we now find the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, since the beginning of the seventeenth century (shortly after the establishment of the first French colony in North America on the Île Sainte-Croix in 1604 and of the first permanent French settlement at Port Royal in 1605).