Language policy in Quebec and Wallonia: two French-speaking linguistic communities, two contrasted political strategies

This chapter compares language policies in Quebec and Wallonia, two regions where a majority French-speaking community constitutes a linguistic minority in a multilingual federal state. We contrast the sociolinguistic situation of the two territories, the general political philosophy of their respective language policy, and the details of the political measures that have been taken in both regions in four areas: linguistic landscape/public communication, education, immigrants’ integration and language corpus planning. We show that policies regarding linguistic matters are rather different in Quebec and Wallonia, since Quebec has developed a coherent and transversal language policy while language is not one of the main political stakes in Wallonia.