Bilingualism in education sometimes arouses mistrust in Quebec as it raises concerns that young Quebecers enrolled in bilingual educational programs may experience subtractive bilingualism—a process whereby the acquisition of English occurs at the expense of French (Conseil supérieur de l’éducation, 2014). These concerns come from Quebec’s linguistic situation, characterized by its distinctiveness: insofar as a majority Francophone population navigates a complex and often ambivalent relationship with Parisian French and normative language standards, while concurrently existing as a linguistic minority within the predominantly Anglophone North American context (Bouchard, 2002). Despite of these tensions, a significant number of students pursue pre-university education in English or within bilingual programs, like the ones offered at Collégial international Sainte-Anne (CiSA), a private bilingual institution where the proportion of courses taught in English increases each semester. Indeed, young people seem to perceive English as a tool, given its high international prestige and the perceived advantages its mastery offers across various professional and academic domains. Pursuing studies in both French and English appear to offer a valuable learning opportunities for cognitive and linguistic development (Rompré, 2022), and a substantial body of research has highlighted the pedagogical value of bilingual education and linguistic immersion (Baetens and Swain, 1985; Baker, 2006; Bialystock, 2001; Cummins, 2003; King and Mackey, 2007; Trommenschlager, 2018).

Within this broader educative and sociolinguistic context, our objective was to examine whether the bilingual programs offered by CiSA have a measurable impact on the occurrence of anglicisms in students’ both oral and written discourse by providing quantitative and qualitative data. Additionally, we sought to explore students’ representations of their own language practices, as well as their perceptions regarding the use of English borrowings. To reach this goal, we followed a group of 25 students over the two years corresponding to the typical duration of study at CiSA. To avoid biases associated with the negative perception of anglicisms (Bouchard, 2011), participants were led to believe that the research focused solely on their media consumption habits. In order to examine participants’ spoken language, four thematic interviews, each approximately 30 minutes in length, were conducted during each semester over a two-year period. These interviews were subsequently analyzed to identify and quantify instances of English borrowings, including full lexical borrowings, hybrid forms, syntactic and semantic borrowings, as well as instances of code-switching. As for written formal language, the final examinations from the three French literature courses were subjected to a comparable analysis, with the addition of a distinct category: orthographic borrowings. The study tracked the evolution in the frequency of English borrowings in both oral and written modalities, as students progressed through their bilingual pre-university level program. Our data show that studying for two years in this bilingual institution did not increase significantly the rate of English borrowings among the students, either in speech or in writing. This communication aims to present the key findings of the study and to explore multiple interpretative perspectives arising from the data.

Keywords: Bilingual education, linguistic practices, anglicisms, linguistic borrowings.