The protection and promotion of French as a distinctive marker of Quebec identity has acquired new urgency over the past fifty years, as secularisation and steep demographic decline among ethnic francophone Quebecers, accompanied by substantial immigration from all corners of the globe, have given rise, notably in Montreal, to a plural, multi-lingual society, whose adherence to Quebec's national project cannot be unproblematically assumed. In 2000, addressing this concern, the Larose Commission, established by the Parti québécois to study ‘the situation and future of the French language in Quebec’, put forward the idea of ‘an inclusive and welcoming Quebec citizenship’ as a means of encouraging Quebec's ethno-culturally diverse 21st century population to accommodate to French. Prefacing each chapter with a key passage from the Commission's report, Leigh Oakes and Jane Warren provide a detailed study of the citizenship proposal. Part 1, ‘New Challenges’, after a brief historical introduction, sets out the essential lines of the political debate, highlighting in turn Fernand Dumont's ethnic model of identity, the purely civic models of Jean-Pierre Derriennic and others, and the ethno-civic models of Gérard Bouchard, Michel Seymour, and Charles Taylor. Part II, ‘A Common Language’, focuses first on Quebec's status language planning culminating in 1977 in La charte de la langue française (Law 101), then on subsequent corpus planning directed towards the establishing of a langue publique d'usage commun, uniting ethnic French-Canadians and immigrant minorities. Complementing this discussion of ethno-culturally controlled, ‘top-down’ language legislation and planning, Part III, ‘Diverse experiences’, offers an ‘on-the-ground’, ‘bottom-up’, look at perceptions of belonging and language amongst the minority communities, immigrant, anglophone, and aboriginal, of Quebec's modern plural society.

Oakes and Warren carefully tease out the intertwinings of language and identity to produce a wide-ranging and judicious account of the complexities of Quebec's current linguistic and civic evolution. Tensions underlying the Larose citizenship proposal are sympathetically but cogently exposed, and rhetoric juxtaposed to pragmatic realities. Oakes and Warren recognise the centrality of the French language as an indispensable marker of citizenship for Quebec's francophone majority, but they also note the impossibility of emptying a language of all ethnic attachment, and thus the difficulties of securing minority adherence to a citizenship model in which language is the major element. Among older immigrants, attachment to French tends to be instrumental, rather than integrative, while second-generation immigrants, equally at home in French and English and affectively identifying with Montreal rather than with Quebec as a whole, represent a bi-lingual, multi-cultural tendency of significant concern for Quebec's national project. The anglophone minority, a residual group following out-migration in the 1970s, is now also often bi-lingual, but has low visibility and low involvement in Quebec civic life, even as the importance of English for success in global markets is acknowledged by Quebec in its English language acquisition planning. Meanwhile the primary attachments of aboriginal minorities to the survival and furtherance of their own linguistic and cultural identities render highly problematic adherence to a citizenship model, based on French and aimed mainly at immigrants.

An outstanding case-study for all those interested in problems of language and majority and minority identity in the era of globalisation, Oakes’ and Warren's insightful reflection on Quebec's continuing search for its modern identity as a plural, democratic, and francophone society in North America, stands as an important reference point in a debate, still ongoing in Quebec and most recently re-engaged in the 2007–8 citizenship, immigration and integration consultations of the Liberals’ Commission sur les accommodements raisonnables. Their book is especially useful in its clear and effective combination of wide-ranging synthesis and detailed illustration. Its extensive 32-page bibliography is an additional bonus, offering a wealth of information for future researchers.