Ignore the below. I'm working out some issues regarding characterizing Francophone cities.

Francophone Cities

There is some discussion regarding characterizing cities, and their relative sizes as Francophone. At issue are cities where French is spoken; the relative importance of the Francophone community in the life of that city. The discussion has political dimensions, since being regarded as a Francophone city portrays the city as having a strong cultural connection to France, which can be considered highly desirable by a city's French-speaking population, while being considered highly *undesirable* by it's non-French-speaking population.

One issue in characterizing the 'Frenchness' of a city is what standard is used. The adjective

we already define as characterizing a population as primarily French in language. "Primarily" is not more precisely defined, and therein lies sufficient ambiguity to

An alternative criterion compares the size of the "Native French Speaking Population". This seems a problematic option: many cities -- including two Afican cities on the list below -- have not had their language makeup accurately measured within a recent census period, or at all, and so precise demographic information is not readily available. Furthermore, this does not seem to be useful to characterize the whole of the city: for example, in Montreal, the "Native French Speaking Population" 890K (1.85M total Stats Canada); but spend 3 minutes downtown, and there's no denying the city is Francophone: French is the sole official language of Quebec (the province Montreal occupies), the sole official language of the city of Montreal, it is the language on all streets signs, used in all businesses. On the other hand, the Talk:Montreal page includes arguments that, because a significant fraction is bilingual (1.0M speak English and French, of 1.85M total Stats Canada); because there are suburbs where the population almost exclusively uses English; the argument is made that Montreal is not a Francophone city -- that is, "in practice", a majority of the population uses multiple languages --- thus making it Allophone in practice, and not accurately described as Francophone.

Name	Census Period	City Population	Urban Area Population	Metropolitan Area Population
Montreal	2006	1,620,693	1,854,442	3,635,571 [1]
Lyon	2007		1,783,400 (2004 est.) [1] http://www.regionurbainedelyon.fr/chiffres-cles/population-38-1.html	4,415,000

Lyon

The above poplation numbers are from the wiki Lyon page, and cite.

Kinshasa

The world's second-largest francophone city is not Montreal, Dakar, or Algiers, as most people would assume, but Kinshasa, capital of the former Zaire. ^[2]

A third factor is simply a demographic one. At least one in ten Congolese live in Kinshasa. With its 6-7 million inhabitants, it is the second largest city in sub-Saharan Africa (after Lagos). It is also the second largest French-speaking city in the world, according to Paris (even though only a small percentage of Kinois speak French correctly). ^[3]

The apostles of francophonie in the 1980s labelled Zaire as the second-largest francophone country, and Kinshasa as the second-largest francophone city. Yet Zaire seemed unlikely to escape a complex multilingualism. Lingala was the language of music, of presidential addresses, of daily life in government and in Kinshasa. But if Lingla was the spoken language of Kinshasa, it made little progress as a written language. French was the written language of the city -- as seen in street signs, posters, newspapers and in government documents. French dominated plays and television as well as the press; French was the language of the national anthem and even for the doctrine of authenticity. Zairian researchers found French to be used in vertical relationships among people of uneven rank; people of equal rank, no matter how high, tended to speak Zairian languages among themselves. Given these limits, French might have lost its place to another of the leading languages of Zaire -- Lingala, Tshiluba, or Swahili -- except that teach of these languages also suffered from limitations on its growth. ^[4]

A generation later, when apartheid had been scrapped, Coca-Cola stopped placing Afrikaans words on it South African Labels. In Zaire, meanwhile, the residents of Kinshasa -- whose rapid population growth had forced Montreal to stop calling itself "the second-largest French-speaking city in the world" -- hurled insults as the country's longtime despot, Mobutu Sese Seko, fled the country. Watching the motorcade of the sick tyrant speed through ravged streets to the airport, people shouted, "We don't have to speak French anymore!" Mobutu's replacement made English an official language." ^[5]

Montreal, Canada's second-largest city, is geographically as close to the European coast as to Vancouver, and in look and feel it combines some of the finest aspects of the two continents. Its North American skyline of glass and concrete rises above churches and monuments in a Melange of European styles as varied as Montreal's social mix. This is also the world's third-largest French-speaking metropolis after Paris and Kinshasa, but only two-thirds of the city's there and a half million people are of French extraction, the other third being a cosmopolotin mishmash of les autres, including British, Eastern Europeans, Chinese ,Italians, Greeks, Jews, Latin Americans and Caribbeans. ^[6]

Roussopoulos, Dimitrios; Benello, C. George, eds. (2005). Participatory Democracy: Prospects for Democratizing Democracy. Montreal: Black Rose Books. p. 292.

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Notes