THE CONCEPT OF ÉCRITURES MIGRANTES, or migrant literature, first appeared in Quebec during the 1980s. The expression was and continues to be used today to refer to the literary production of writers who, after immigrating to Canada, decided to settle in Quebec — the only Canadian province with a francophone majority — and to write or at least publish within the framework of the province's literary institutions. The criteria for classifying a work as migrant literature vary from one source to another. For Daniel Chartier, author of the Dictionnaire des écrivains émigrés au Québec 1800–1999 (2003), language is not a determining factor. According to him, a work can be written in any of the two official languages of Canada, French or English, or, for that matter, in any idiom of a distinct linguistic minority (Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, etc.) that chooses to express itself in its mother tongue, and still be identified as migrant or, closer to the author's perspective, immigrant literature. On the other hand, the Dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires du Québec (seven volumes published to date, encompassing the vast period from 1534 to 1985) still considers language as a discriminating factor, or even as the only valid criterion for distinguishing between Québécois and non-Québécois literary works. To be acknowledged as a “genuine” oeuvre from Quebec, the authors of the dictionary implicitly assume that the work must be written in French, considered not only the official language of Quebec, but also the only idiom in which a “true” Québécois (the former French Canadian as opposed to the English Canadian) expresses him- or herself.