Volume 2007, Issue 185

In a past issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language , Richard Bourhis (1994) edited a number of articles that dealt with “French-English language issues in Canada.” The issue dealt with language contacts from both a national and a regional basis. The present issue of IJSL focuses on the official language minorities of Canada, that is, English in Quebec (the only province where French is the sole official language) and French outside Quebec, the latter being a minority language in the other nine provinces and three federal territories. French does have official status with English in the small province of New Brunswick, where Francophones constitute one-third of the population. It also has official status with English and some aboriginal languages in the three northern territories. However, language issues in Canada's confederation are diverse and official language minorities experience a wide variety of sociolinguistic contexts. Before we present the structure and content of this special IJSL issue, we give a brief overview of some historical background relevant to this topic of official language minorities in Canada.

The British conquest of Canada in 1760 marked the birth of an Englishspeaking minority in the colony. Although its political, economic, and social influence was great, numbers remained small until British immigration increased substantially in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1850, English speakers made up nearly a quarter of the total population and were a majority in Montreal. Most could trace their origins to the British Isles, but over the next century people from other European countries were integrated into the community. English language schools played an important role in reinforcing the community until the Charter of the French language (1977) forced immigrants to attend French schools. The creation of separate institutions in education, health, and social services allowed English speakers to live apart from the majority and consider that they were part of an English-Canadian majority. The community relied on the mediation of their elites to defend their concerns. The old order collapsed, however, in the face of more vociferous national aspirations on the part of the majority. Since the election of a Parti Québécois government in 1976, uncertainty has increased and numbers have dwindled, putting into question the future viability of the community.

From the time when France settled New France in the seventeenth century to the present, the French-speaking population went from a majority in a French colony to a minority in an English-speaking country. It was at first located in three areas: Canada, Acadia, and Louisiana. It expanded from the St. Lawrence Valley and the province of Quebec to New England and in many areas of the other provinces of Canada. They brought with them their language, their culture, their institutions and, to a very large extent, their way of life. For a long time, language and religion were the main characteristics of French Canada and Acadia. Change and the welfare state affected them very profoundly in the 1960s and after. The federal government took a series of positive measures, including the Official Languages Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and contributed to the survival and development of francophone communities. While Quebec asserted its difference, developed an independence movement, and paradoxically played a central role in the recent evolution of Canada, French Canada became la francophonie canadienne , comprised of Acadie and provincial minority communities, with the recent return of Quebec.

Language rights are an important part of the socio-legal environment in Canada. This article examines the constitutional division of legislative powers over language in Canada and its consequence on language rights. It also looks into constitutional language rights to ascertain how these rights shape the future of linguistic communities in Canada. The article shows that constitutionally protected language rights foster the constitutional dialogue theory and helps to advance the status and power of French and English minorities in a delicate balance between courts and legislatures, federal and provincial jurisdictions, and English minorities in Quebec and French minorities outside Quebec.

Resolving matters related to identity, leadership, and governance has represented a considerable challenge in the community-building process of Quebec's English-speaking population. Despite a strong institutional network in the Montreal region where the majority of English speakers reside, there have been important debates about how and by whom political advocacy and representation are conducted on behalf of the minority language community. Organizations delivering education, health and social services to Montreal's English-speaking population have assumed near complete responsibility for representing their concerns to government, thereby forcing the once influential language-based advocacy bodies to rethink their objectives. Problems of governance and leadership in organizations defending the concerns of Quebec English speakers have also been challenged by the need to define a constituency which is in a state of demographic flux. It is contended that under certain conditions, being institutionally complete does not lead to community vitality and may result in some disengagement from the broader society. It is further argued that no study of the institutional completeness and governance of Canada's language minorities can be complete without properly evaluating the role of government as principal stakeholder and, as such, examining its influence on identity formation of the country's language minorities.

This article discusses Canada's governance of official language minorities since the 1990s. More specifically, it examines the growing participation of official language minority groups in the governance of policy initiatives in sectors such as community development, culture, and economic development. It argues that horizontal governance is transforming our understanding of language planning, but also that official language minorities believe they need to maintain political pressure on the Canadian government for more positive measures towards their empowerment. In other words, horizontal governance is no substitute for language politics. Firstly, the article reviews recent debates on the politics and governance of identity-based policies such as language policies. Secondly, it provides information on Canada's official language policy and on the context which led to development of a new governance of official language minorities. Thirdly, it discusses results from a series of studies which help understand the resistance of official language minorities towards horizontal governance. In conclusion, the article argues for more research on the impact of horizontal governance on language planning.

In the 1960s, the Anglophone community in Quebec tended to see itself as a “majority” group, despite their demographic weight within the province. Efforts to change the status of French and French speakers provoked a redefinition of the status of Anglophones and an important transformation of the community and of its institutions — transformations that are still ongoing. In this article, we take a look at the Anglo-Quebec community today, a community that is increasingly bilingual, multicultural, and hybrid, a community which is also in decline. We then discuss how this reflects on the challenges and issues facing the English school system — a school system mandated with ensuring the vitality of the official language minority, but also with the preparation of students for life in an increasingly French Quebec.

The article gives an overview of the sociopolitical context that led to the provision of educational rights to Francophone minorities outside Quebec. It also presents a conceptual framework that distinguishes between French immersion, a bilingual program intended to promote additive bilingualism for majority group members, and French schooling, an approach developed to foster additive bilingualism for minority group members. French schooling is described as a cornerstone to cultural autonomy, a process that leads to cultural survival and ethnolinguistic vitality. The concept of cultural autonomy is defined as well as each of its components: social proximity, institutional completeness, and ideological legitimacy. Finally, the article discusses the challenges of the Canadian Francophone minorities in their quest for cultural autonomy. This cultural autonomy model of minority education is seen as unique and as an approach to minority education that could be applied to other linguistic minorities.

This article deals with the collective efforts of the Francophone minority communities (FMCs), that is, Francophones outside the province of Quebec, to ensure their economic development. After a brief historical overview of the economic development forms taken by the FMCs, we will more closely analyze its current form, focusing on the partnership tendency between these FMCs and the state. The FMCs did not rely on the state before the 1970s for their development, since networks of Francophone associations took charge of their overall development. When the Official Languages Act came into effect in 1969, the situation changed in favor of an increasing development of a partnership between the government and the FMCs, assisted by funding. In this article, we present the form taken by this partnership in the economic sector, focusing on the first program set up by the Canadian state to specifically encourage the economic development of Francophone minorities: the Réseau de développement économique et d'employabilité (RDÉE). The RDÉE gave FMCs access to the first economic development government instrument aimed specifically at them. The RDÉE looks to adopt a partnership approach and encourage empowerment among FMCs. The analysis shows some of the partnership issues involved in the real implication of the empowerment by these communities for their own development, the sometimes difficult link between the governance structures and the FMCs' networks, as well as the legitimacy of the governance structures implemented within the RDÉE.

This article reviews key elements of the model of multilingual communication (MMC) (Sachdev and Bourhis 2001, 2005) as they pertain to the case of the “two solitudes” in the province of Quebec: the Francophone majority and the Anglophone minority. The first part of the article provides an intergroup analysis of how language laws in Quebec succeeded in changing the respective ethnolinguistic vitality of the Francophone majority and the Anglophone minority in the province. Along with the MMC, communication accommodation theory is used to review the intergroup, normative, and social psychological determinants of bilingual switching behaviors, as well as specific social psychological studies of bilingual communication conducted in Quebec. The second part of the article describes empirical field studies of language accommodation in Montreal conducted in 1977, 1979, and 1991 (Bourhis 1984b; Moïse and Bourhis 1994). As a follow-up to our earlier studies, the goal of the 1997 experiment (N = 482) was to monitor the language strategies adopted by pedestrians who were randomly accosted by a white or black female confederate who voiced a plea for directions in either English or French. Results of the 1997 study showed that both Francophone and Anglophone pedestrians overwhelmingly converged to the linguistic needs of the white and black confederate.

This article analyzes the ethnolinguistic development of linguistic minority group members using two complementary models. The first is a macroscopic model of the factors that influence the ethnolinguistic development of minorities in intergroup contexts. The model comprises three levels of factors: a) the macrosocial, comprising two sublevels (ideological, legal and political framework; institutional and social context), b) the microsocial (linguistic and cultural socialization), and c) the psychological (ethnolinguistic development). The second model analyzes specific hypotheses between the microsocial and psychological levels. This model shows precise relationships between different aspects of language and cultural socialization and important components of ethnolinguistic development (for example, linguistic competencies, group identity, subjective vitality, language motivation, language use). These models take into consideration factors that are related to social determinism and others that favor selfdetermination at the group and individual levels. The second model can be tested empirically with the use of structural equation modeling. Examples of research with Francophone minority group members in Canada are presented. It is contended that these models could be applied to other linguistic minorities.

In the light of the other contributions to this issue, which offer various perspectives on ethnolinguistic minorities — Anglophones in Quebec and Francophones in Canada outside Quebec — this article explores the question of how the identity process unfolds in these minority groups. These processes do not reflect pure definitions of types of identity groups, such as nation, minority nationalism, or ethnic groups. They are, instead, an interlocking pattern of these different types, which produces a dynamic determined, in large part, by historic modes of national integration particular to the Canadian context. The specific dynamic, rather than leading us away from our understanding of ethnolinguistic identities, leads us towards the possibility of a better understanding of how contemporary societies are constructed by the interweaving of ethnolinguistic and ethnocultural groups, national minorities and nations.

Daniel Bourgeois: Canadian Bilingual Districts: From Cornerstone to Tombstone . Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006. 326pp. (Gino LeBlanc) Jacques L. Boucher and Joseph Yvon Thériault, editors: Petites sociétés et minorités nationales: enjeux politiques et perspectives comparées . Sainte-Foy: Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2005. 398pp. (Christophe Traisnel) Marc L. Johnson and Paule Doucet: Une vue plus claire: évaluer la vitalité des communautés de langue officielle en situation minoritaire. Ottawa: Commissariat aux langues officielles, 2006. (Éric Forgues)