Cultural Communities (Quebec)

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French-Canadian or Canadian were abandonded during the Quiet Revolution as appropriate ethnic labels for the white, francophone Catholic population residing in the province of Quebec and claiming descendance from the settlers of New France. The term Québécois (or Quebecker in English), once used indiscriminately to refer to any inhabitant of the province, quickly became the favoured replacement. The term cultural communities (or in French, les communautés culturelles) was thus invented to denote non-French-Canadian Quebeckers.

The term dates from the first Parti Québécois government in the late 1970s. It is intentionally broad and is almost always used in the plural, that is, one does not refer to any group alone as a cultural community. Furthermore, the term is almost always rendered in French, even in English media. Anglophones, in addition to the well-established immigrant groups, such as the Italians, the Greeks and the Portuguese at first considered the term to be derisive. It was understood as excluding them from Quebec society and as presenting them in opposition to the province's francophone majority. However, as with the term allophone, the immigrant population in Montreal slowly reappropriated this item of bureaucratic jargon. It is now often used proudly as a label illustrating the refusal of these groups to be assimilated into the French mainstream.

Newer arrivals, such as the Arabs and the Haitians, are also referred to as cultural communities. The term is not politically-charged for them, however, as it is for the older groups, because most of them arrived after the turbulent decades of the '60s, '70s and '80s. As francophones, they have also been better assimilated into the French majority.