2025_quebec_census_active_use

Multilingual children’s language outcomes vary considerably, particularly their expressive abilities (Ribot & Hoff, 2014). Previous research has attempted to explain this variation by examining direct relationships between outcomes and children’s language exposure (e.g. Bedore et al., 2016) or by appealing to categorical contextual factors such as the status of the language in society (e.g., Montrul, 2018). Far less common are analyses of multilingual children’s developmental outcomes in relation to multiple, interconnected contextual factors. Furthermore, research has tended to focus on Spanish-English bilingualism in the U.S. (Hoff, 2018; Surran & Luk, 2023; Ronderos et al., 2022). We address this gap by adopting the Systems Framework of multilingual development (Byers-Heinlein et al., 2025) and examining children's community and interpersonal contexts in relation to their active use – that is, their regular production in speaking – of multiple languages in the context of Quebec, Canada. We do this by leveraging available census data as well as questionnaire data collected as part of this larger project.