By 2023, English will become the main language of theses and dissertations in Quebec

A tipping point may be reached in 2023. This year, a greater number of theses and dissertations should be published in English than in French in Quebec.

This is one of the findings emerging from an update of the study I presented at the end of April within the framework of the forum. Science in French Organized by Quebec Research Funds.

A corpus of over 110,000 documents

How did I achieve these results? I harvested all theses and dissertations in the institutional directories of 17 of the 20 universities in Quebec (see methodological notes at the end of the article).

I had done this work For the first time in 2016 Akfas Magazine. At that time, I was only interested in the length, degree, discipline, university of these documents.

I have Five years later, the study was updatedI added a section and also studied it The language in which each document is written. My data covers the years 2000 to 2020 and the growth of English is clear.

For the FRQ forum, I made a new update to include the years 2021 and 2022, and check if the anglicization of documents attesting to graduate degrees has continued. I’ll sell you punch right away: it goes on.

My corpus contains about 110,000 theses and dissertations published in the last 23 years (2000 to 2022). During this period, more than 62% of these documents confirming a person’s life in higher education were written in the language of Brother Marie-Victor.

The graph below shows how languages ​​are distributed according to the given standard. At master’s level, 33.4% of theses were written in English, and this was the case for 46.3% of doctoral theses. In short, since the turn of the century, one in three master’s theses and one in two doctoral theses have been written in English in Quebec.

Evolution over time

When we break down the data by year, we realize the growth in English usage over the last twenty years.

Proportions reported prior to 2007 are not highly representative, as institutional repositories contain fewer papers published in those years. But since then, the trend is clear. In 2022, of the 4,452 theses and dissertations I found in institutional directories at the time of my harvest (February 2023), 2,200 were written in English, 2,248 in French, and four in another language. If this trend continues, English will overtake French in graduate production in Quebec by 2023.

By distinguishing between dissertations and theses, the portrait is refined.

In the second cycle, most of theses were still published in French. But in the third cycle, the French are already in the minority from 2018.

The situation in French-speaking universities

This predominance of English may be explained by the two English-speaking universities of Montreal, McGill and Concordia, accounting for nearly a third of documents found in Quebec’s institutional directories. We will exclude them to focus only on the 15 French-speaking universities in Quebec.

The two graphs above show that the French language is very strong there. Nevertheless, English is progressing so that by 2022, one in six master’s degrees and one in three doctoral degrees issued at one of Quebec’s 15 French-speaking universities will be in Rutherford’s language.

Breakdown by Company

The two graphs below present the proportion of research papers and theses published in English by year and institution, showing that the situation is not evolving at the same pace everywhere.

They clearly show that it is happening at the doctoral level, especially at universities that specialize in engineering. In 2021 and 2022, 198 of the 304 doctoral degrees awarded at Polytechnique Montreal and ÉTS were based on a thesis written in English (65%).

Refine the metadata

In Quebec, it is rare for a thesis or dissertation to be written entirely in English. French always has at least one abbreviation.

In some cases, a master’s or doctoral degree consists of publishing articles (in English) in a scientific journal. Their signatories then attempt to write common introductions and conclusions in French.

This is found, for example, in This dissertation was prepared at Laval University. The introduction is more solid with its 44 pages. The result is 16 pages long. Both are written in French. But the four articles that make up the bulk of the dissertation are written in English and run to 114 pages. Hence the language assigned to this document is English. But actually, its content can be said to be 65% English and 35% French.

Metadata associated with dissertations and theses do not make it possible to specify the extent to which a language is used in a document. Standards that define this metadata etc Dublin Core For example, say multiple languages ​​may be responsible for the same document. But it is necessary to refine them to include the ratio of each. We no doubt have a better, and less dramatic, portrait of French in higher education.

It is true that the picture of the French place in all scientific activities in Canada and Quebec remains bleak. Researcher Vincent Larivière was already paying attention In 2015, the work was published by Quebec researchers and indexed in the table Web of Science Almost 100% in English in Natural Sciences and Engineering, 95% in Humanities and Social Sciences, 67% in Arts and Humanities.

Most recently Radio-Canada has proven 95% of research funded in Canada between 2019 and 2022 is after an application written in English. The data I present complete the portrait by looking at the language used by budding scientists who are master’s and doctoral students.

Therefore, science at all levels, from graduate studies to publication in scholarly journals, including research funding, must be done in English to be recognized in Quebec.

Of course, the Anglicization of science is a global phenomenon. This affects the powers in the quest like Germany, France, Japan or China. But isn’t science a reflection of a culture, just like literature, music or cinema?

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Methodological notes

The data is sometimes extracted directly from companies’ directories, and sometimes harvested from Érudit Theses and Dissertations Section. I describe this function in detail a Github directory. About 103,000 documents were thus collected.

About 500 were added using metadata ProQuest Thesis and Research Papers provided Vincent LarivièreTo whom I thank.

About 6,000 people were included using metadata From Library and Archives CanadaPresented by Alexander Jerabek, Pierre Nault and Melanie Verville, UQAM LibrariesI also thank him.

Three companies that are not:

• Bishop’s University, because of its Bishop’s University Institutional Directory No dissertation or thesis;

• UQ’s headquarters, it does not host any students;

• Royal Military College Saint-Jean, because it will be recognized as a university in Quebec in June 2021, Its corporate directory It is not possible to determine whether a dissertation or thesis was completed at its Kingston campus or at its Saint-Jean campus.

Finally, when I gave my presentation on the FRQ forum, there were still 1,500 documents for which I could not identify a ranking. These are mostly Laval University theses and dissertations, which are updated Its corporate directory Harvesting in 2021 is getting tougher! But managed to figure out how to access it programmatically. The data I present in this article is exhaustive. I make them available Borealis, UQAM’s institutional research data repository.