This paper documents the linguistic landscape of Saint Catherine Street, a major thoroughfare in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The street is taken as a microcosm of the sociolinguistic variation observable at the various levels of analysis, ranging from the neighbourhood, the city, the province, Canada as a whole, and the globally similar environment…

This study focuses on L2 French spoken in two different Laurentian settings in Canada: L2 French spoken by anglophones who have developed bilingual community practices in Montreal, where French is the majority language; and L2 French spoken by anglophones who have learned French in a formal context in Ontario, where French is a minority language.…

French immersion (FI) programs are becoming increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse as a result of growing migration to Canada. In the present mixed-methods study, I explore the perspectives and ideologies of teachers, principals, and central office staff in eight school divisions in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta with respect to…

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of…

This Perspectives article proposes a renewed vision of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) through a translanguaging (TL) stance, grounded in critical sociolinguistic inquiry and embodied practice. A TL theory of language asserts an activist agenda to dismantle mono/lingualism, inviting a more dynamic and expansive view of…

This study responds to scholarship that has examined "folk concepts" of (non)nativeness through the lens of imagined ideals of the native speaker, by proposing a framework that integrates both ideals and habits. We operationalize these concepts by drawing from the theoretical notions of chronotope, scale, and habitus. Using data from…

Do French-Canadian (FC) minorities in New Brunswick and Ontario remain as committed as majority Francophone Quebecers in developing their vitality within Canada's bilingual belt? FCs constitute host communities for interprovincial migrants of FC and English-Canadian (EC) background who can bolster or weaken the vitality of FCs. How FCs and ECs…

Taking a broad interest in the linguistic, educational, and identity issues relevant to young people, this article examines the experiences and discourses of linguistic minority youth in the French-dominant context of Québec City. Our analysis is based on qualitative interviews conducted with 10 young people who speak a language other than French…

This article explores the beliefs about second language (L2) sociolinguistic competence of four university-level advanced L2 learners. It places particular emphasis on 1) how these university learners conceptualized L2 sociolinguistic competence; 2) how they thought about two different language learning contexts (viz., the L2 classroom versus…

This paper looks at reading in French immersion and how learning French is seen more as a skill rather than a social practice that could be examined through a more critical lens. Most of the teachers often teach students how to read but rarely will they discuss the role of French in Canadian society and how this is manifested in the texts they…

In their keynote contribution, Poplack, Zentz & Dion (henceforth PZD; Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2011, this issue) propose an interesting "scientific test of convergence" (under section heading: "Introduction") which contains criteria to check whether a particular feature in a given language in contact with another one is…

Language policies in any country exist within socio-historical contexts--embedded in history and influenced by socio-political factors. In Canada, such factors were the impetus to the formation of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which was grounded in an English/French partnership and recommended that Canada become an…

This article will examine the sociopolitical language contexts that exist in institutions of Canadian post-secondary education, through investigating how government policies affect the consumption and teaching of language in writing classrooms. A survey of Canadian multiculturalist policy, multilingualism, and post-secondary education in terms of…

Linguistic imperialism, linguistic hegemony and linguistic cosmopolitanism are broad and contrasting conceptualizations of linguistic globalization that are frequently, if implicitly, invoked in the literature, both academic and non-academic, on language practices and perceptions in the call center industry. I begin with outlining each of these…

Most linguistic processes--acquisition, change, deterioration--take place in and are determined by a complex and multifactorial web of language internal and language external influences. This implies that the impact of each individual factor can only be determined on the basis of a careful consideration of its interplay with all other factors. The…