Official language minorities in Canada: an introduction
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Rodrigue Landry
Abstract
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.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Official language minorities in Canada: an introduction
- The English-speaking minority of Quebec: a historical perspective
- From “Nouvelle-France” to “Francophonie canadienne”: a historical survey
- Legal environment of official languages in Canada
- Follow the leaders: reconciling identity and governance in Quebec's Anglophone population
- Language politics and horizontal governance
- Anglo-Quebec today: looking at community and schooling issues
- Bilingual schooling of the Canadian Francophone minority: a cultural autonomy model
- The Canadian state and the empowerment of the Francophone minority communities regarding their economic development
- Language planning and French-English bilingual communication: Montreal field studies from 1977 to 1997
- A macroscopic intergroup approach to the study of ethnolinguistic development
- Ethnolinguistic minorities and national integration in Canada
- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Official language minorities in Canada: an introduction
- The English-speaking minority of Quebec: a historical perspective
- From “Nouvelle-France” to “Francophonie canadienne”: a historical survey
- Legal environment of official languages in Canada
- Follow the leaders: reconciling identity and governance in Quebec's Anglophone population
- Language politics and horizontal governance
- Anglo-Quebec today: looking at community and schooling issues
- Bilingual schooling of the Canadian Francophone minority: a cultural autonomy model
- The Canadian state and the empowerment of the Francophone minority communities regarding their economic development
- Language planning and French-English bilingual communication: Montreal field studies from 1977 to 1997
- A macroscopic intergroup approach to the study of ethnolinguistic development
- Ethnolinguistic minorities and national integration in Canada
- Book reviews
