Stable Bilingualism and Multilingualism in Canada (was: Endangered languages)

Tue Oct 10 17:06:35 UTC 2006

Glad to see such an interesting discussion about language diversity.
My two (Canadian) cents, to keep the ball rolling. (I'm sending those
comments as a French-speaking linguistic anthropologist from Montreal
who is *not* a specialist of Canada.)

Bilingualism in Canada is quite specific. Unless otherwise specified,
the term "bilingual" refers to *individuals* who are fluent in both
French and English. There is a perceived imbalance in the degree of
"bilingualism" among French- and English-speakers. Bilingualism in
other languages tends to be treated separately. Fluency is evaluated
using many criteria, including "accent" and even eloquence.
English and French are the (only) two official languages in Canada.
Official status for both languages has important consequences in
federal politics and administration. Given the official status of both
languages, bilingualism often implies advantages in professional
placement. New Brunswick is the only province to be officially
bilingual (it has the largest French-speaking population outside of
Quebec); Quebec is officially French-speaking (with important
political consequences); other provinces are officially
English-speaking; territories follow federal regulations, though
Inuktitut/Inuinnaqtun has official status in Nunavut (not sure on the
details).
Functional bilingualism can be said to be fairly stable in some
specific regions. However, the situation in most French-speaking
communities outside of Quebec is usually perceived as a potential
switch from French to English: children of "inter-marriages" are
likely to only speak English. This switch is perceived, in
French-speaking communities, as tantamount to language loss. Language
insecurity is at rather high levels in many French-speaking
communities outside of Quebec.
In Quebec, the perceived likelihood that French would disappear has
decreased dramatically over the past several years. In such a
situation, bilingualism is infrequently perceived as a threat.
French-speaking Quebeckers appear quite secure in their (our) language
use and they (we) will often use English in multi-lingual situations,
without any fear of language, status, or identity loss. Perhaps
because of French language ideology, English-speakers fluent in French
tend not to speak French with native speakers of the language (outside
of formal contexts in which bilingualism might be expected).
In short, the general model is one of monolingual communities (either
French- or English-speaking) with bilingual individuals.

Multilingualism is often seen as a completely separate issue. Apart
from the status of the French language here, multilingualism in Canada
seems fairly comparable to multilingualism in the U.S., despite
significant differences in policies and in perceptions. A simplistic
explanation of differences: for a relatively long time, Canadian
policies have tended to emphasize the right for immigrant groups to
"maintain their cultural identities," including their native languages
(the "mosaic" model instead of the "melting pot"); several languages
besides English and Spanish are involved in social and political
issues; multilingualism is probably more of an urban phenomenon
throughout Canada (most of the Canadian population is concentrated in
a relatively small number of cities); languages of First
Nations/aboriginal/Native/autochtonous groups are the object of some
concern but relatively little attention is paid to those issues by the
general population.
Regardless of these issues, the three-generation pattern is perceived
as the dominant one throughout Canada, with relatively few exceptions.
Stable bilingualism in, say, Punjabi and English or Italian and French
is usually limited to specific neighborhoods in one of Canada's
largest cities.

To briefly go back to the original article which sparked this
discussion, language diversity in Canada is probably increasing but
the notion that this diversity might threaten English is rather
uncommon. One of the reasons might be that functional bilingualism is
perceived favourably by many people.

On 10/6/06, Patrick, Peter L <patrickp at essex.ac.uk> wrote:
> Several sorts of confusion here... This is not so much to argue with
> Claire as to be provocative, to make us think a little harder about the
> Q.
>
> If Canada is (as I suspect) still in N America, there is stable
> multilingualism in the continent on a national/ official level. (So, I
> believe, is Mexico, but let that pass for now!)
>
> "Stable" cannot usefully mean "undergoing no change at all", but has to
> mean something loosely like healthy, able to persist, not rapidly
> disappearing in the next century (after all, over 1000 years, almost
> nothing is stable!). But since French/English bilingualism is very
> localised, I'll bet the percent of speakers in Canada does not rise to
> CB's unstated level.
>
> Secondly, nations are not generally "communities" in any useful sense,
> and even more rarely speech communities. To generalise about
> multilingualism at a national level is very different than at a (speech)
> community level. There are certainly multilingual speech communities
> within the US, some of them old and stable by the definition below.
>         Thirdly, as speech communities are not necessarily political
> units, and language census problems are well-known, it's difficult to
> see how one can apply population ratios (though it has been tried) in a
> simple and straightforward way. An exercise better-known to me was Derek
> Bickerton's attempt to specify a population ratio requirement for
> creolization to take place (e.g. 1984 in BBS), which failed miserably as
> it was too simplistic.
>         For that matter, what is "the proportion of the US who are
> multilingual"? One could make a start by browsing at
> http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/lang_use.html
> In 2000, 18 percent of the total population aged 5 and over (47.0
> million people) reported they spoke a language other than English at
> home, and 92.7% of these said they spoke English to some degree. This
> gives roughly 43.5 million people in the US (16.7%) who report being
> able to speak at least two languages (one of which is English - that's
> the Census's bias). Obviously the total number must be larger, incl.
> those multilingual in two-plus languages other than English.
>         Of course, this is all self-report data, so likely to be
> erroneous in all possible directions, and a poor predictor of stable
> bilingualism - but it addresses CB's two criteria (domain: use English
> at home, proportion: but what is her desired proportion? Greater or less
> than 17%?) in minimal fashion, and exposes that things are very much
> more complicated than suggested...
>         In my view, the main reason that the US is not commonly seen as
> multilingual is ideological. This drives both the facts and changes of
> societal language choice, and colors linguists' beliefs. For millions of
> people - not a negligible number - daily life in the US is multilingual
> in ways that are probably not transient. Perhaps Claire is opposing
> herself to the prevailing monolingual ideology, rather than to this
> common fact...
>
> Peter L. Patrick
> Dept. of Language and Linguistics
> University of Essex
> Wivenhoe Park
> Colchester CO4 3SQ, U.K.
> patrickp at essex.ac.uk
> (+44) 1206  872088
> http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu
> [mailto:owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu] On Behalf Of Claire Bowern
> Sent: 04 October 2006 17:15
> To: linganth at cc.rochester.edu
> Subject: Re: [Linganth] Endangered languages
>
> A quick comment re multilingualism and stability: Pretty much all the
> stable multilingual communities in the world have a couple of
> characteristics. There has to be a certain proportion of the population
> who are multilingual, and it's always much higher than the proportion of
>
> the US who are multilingual. Secondly, there have to be established
> domains for each language. The US has neither at a national level
> (although plenty of examples of both at the local level).
> Claire
>
> > "unstable?" Who is to say that North America won't become like other
> > parts of the world with long histories of stable multilingualism?
> >
>
>

-- 
Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/