We have to be careful when reading the news, because many articles are misleading at least in one way (though the mistakes are usually innocent). Statistics are too often without context and, without easily accessible sources, they’re difficult to verify. Here’s an example of potentially flawed statistics:

Not even one in five 18- to 24-year-old French speakers says a university degree is essential, compared with two in five English speakers, according to a survey by the Association for Canadian Studies, based in Montreal. Two in three young people whose first language is not English or French see a degree as critical. So who is likely to be left behind in the economy of the future?

We have to be skeptical when a survey is distributed to two different linguistic groups. In this case, the definition of “essential” is entirely subjective and it is quite possible that, though “essentiel” and “essential” share the same etymology, they do not mean precisely the same thing in both languages.

My understanding of the word is irrelevant since this is the kind of question that can vary significantly from individual to individual, but it is still possible that the average definition of the word varies between Canadian English and Quebec French. This “definition” I speak of would be the assumption after “this is essential to [...]“. Essential to be happy? To be rich? Or perhaps to survive? To be healthy?

For example, anglophones might be more likely to take a subjective approach in calling something essential. In this sense, a university degree is essential because I have decided that it was for my future or because everyone should treat it as essential and decidedly guide themselves towards such an achievement.

On the other hand, a francophone might say that it is not essential because electricians, plumbers as well as other professionals manage to maintain a very good standard of living without a university degree. Indeed, a professional degree might very well offer better employment opportunities than a bachelor’s degree. Or perhaps they might just say that it is not essential to our survival.

Is there truly such a difference? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the science definitely supports this as a possibility. This factor that would have biased the survey is called the “language priming” effect. For example, there was an experiment in Hong Kong which took a lot of perfectly bilingual students and separated them into two groups. One group was primed to think in English by doing something like pairing them up and having them speak together only in English. While the other was primed to think in Chinese. After this, they were each administered a questionnaire (to be more specific: a self-congrual scale) to measure their thinking on a scale from “independent” to “interdependent”. The group that was primed in English was more “independent” in their conception of society while the group that was primed in Chinese was more “interdependent” in their conception of society. Do keep in mind that these students were selected and, assuming that there was no statistical irregularity, each group was equally bilingual and pretty much the same on all factors. Thus, it would seem, that language can have an effect on the way we think, even on subtle things such as how we understand our role in society.

In the survey mentioned in the Globe and Mail, the francophone participants mostly spoke, worked, studied, thought in French just about all the time, while the other group did the same, but with English. Is it a long-shot to assume that this might affect the assumptions they add on the word “essential”?. I don’t think so. Thus, it would seem to me that the Globe and Mail article would have been better off without resorting to statistics of dubious significance.

(I can not find the study, but see: Dixon, 2007; Dixon and Robinson-Riegler, 2009. This one also seems interesting, though the full-text is unavailable.)

-Dussault

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