Language, mobility and (in)security: A journey through Francophone Canada

Michelle Daveluy | University of Alberta

The proposed journey focuses on localised groups of French speakers in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec and Alberta but also on transient workers that go back and forth to their workplace and military families who are relocated at regular intervals within the country. Linkages between language, mobility and (in)security are assessed through the analysis of linguistic variables that illustrate the enactment of local norms of interaction among mobile Canadian French speakers. Continuities among groups that may superficially appear, and are often theorised, as disconnected become prominent. I ultimately suggest that Francophone Canada is best grasped as a set of multilingual speech communities rather than as a unidimensionally conceived series of groups sharing the exclusive commonality of speaking French.

Keywords: Francophone Canada, language ideology, language policy, language rights, military personnel, mobile speakers, speech communities, T/V address forms

Published online: 26 September 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.24.06dav

Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Heller, Monica, Lindsay Bell, Michelle Daveluy, Hubert Noël & Mireille McLaughlin

2014. La mobilité au coeur de la francophonie canadienne. Recherches sociographiques 55:1 ► pp. 79 ff.

Zeiter, Anne-Christel

2019. Francophone Canadian, franco-mobile, Tamil? Unfolding identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 23:1 ► pp. 82 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 may 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.