Assimilation in Multilingual Cities

Type of resource
Authors/collaborators
Title
Assimilation in Multilingual Cities
Abstract
The authors characterise how the assimilation patterns of minorities into the strong and the weak language differ in a situation of asymmetric bilingualism. Using large variations in language composition in Canadian cities from the 2001 and 2006 Censuses, they show that the differences in the knowledge of English by immigrant Allophones in English-majority Canadian cities are mainly due to sorting across cities. However, in French-majority cities (i.e. Montreal), learning plays an important role in explaining differences in knowledge of French. In addition, they point out that the presence of a large Anglophone minority deters much more the assimilation into French than the presence of Francophone minorities deters the assimilation into English. Finally, the authors found that language distance plays a much more important role in explaining assimilation into French, and that assimilation into French is much more sensitive to individual characteristics than assimilation into English. They conclude that some of these asymmetric assimilation patterns extend to Anglophone and Francophone immigrants, but no evidence of learning is found in this case.
Publication
Journal of Population Economics
Volume
Vol. 28
Issue
no. 3
Pages
785-815
Date
July 2015
Language
en
Citation
Ortega, Javier, and Gregory Verdugo. “Assimilation in Multilingual Cities.” Journal of Population Economics Vol. 28, no. 3 (July 2015): 785–815.
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