The purpose of this section is to compare the Canadian bilingual model with six other models of multilingual societies adopted around the world: Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, Ireland, India and Spain.
Indeed, Canada is not the only state in the world to be officially bilingual. In 2017, there were 55 so-called bilingual, trilingual, or even quadrilingual countries. In general, the central state is multilingual, often a regional or federated state, but never a whole country.
In Canada, the federal conception of bilingualism promotes a symmetrical view of official languages, according to which Anglophones and Francophones are considered equal. By virtue of this duality, Canada has two majorities in which linguistic minorities are found, English in Quebec and French in the other provinces. The application of this principle consists in taking measures to protect the Francophone minorities in the English provinces and the Anglophone minority in Quebec. There are therefore no Canadian minorities, but only provincial minorities.
Obviously, other countries, Belgium, Switzerland, India, Finland, Ireland and Spain, have found different formulas for multilingualism in their territories. In all these countries, the central State ensures multilingualism in the institutions under its jurisdiction, except in Spain where bilingualism is the responsibility of certain regional states (Basque in the Basque Country, Catalan in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia, Galician in Galicia, etc.). India has developed a special multilingualism in that one of the official languages, English, is a mother tongue for a small fraction of the population (2%), unlike Hindi (45%). The situation is the similar in Ireland since one of the official languages, Irish, is spoken by only 3.5% of the population compared with 84% for English. As for Belgium and Switzerland, the territorial separation of official languages prevails, which is totally different from Canada. Finally, it is in Finland, with Finnish and Swedish as official languages, that one can find the most similarities with Canada, although Finnish bilingualism is based on a territorialized application of languages according to the municipalities recognized as bilingual or unilingual.