A Systems Approach to Multilingual Language Attitudes: A Case Study of Montréal, Québec, Canada

One hundred twenty-three Montreal French–English bilingual adults (Mage = 21.20, SD = 3.21) completed self-report questionnaires on demographic information and their attitudes toward languages. A subset of these bilinguals (n = 73) completed a social network survey. The authors used language-tagged social network analysis and geospatial demographic analysis to examine the role of individual characteristics (i.e., first language), interpersonal language dynamics (i.e., person-to-person interactions), and ecological language dynamics (i.e., neighborhood language exposure). At an individual level, the authors found that bilinguals’ language background (i.e., first language) predicted attitudes of solidarity toward a language (i.e., whether a language is associated with personal identity and belongingness). When considering sociolinguistic layers of influence, they found that bilinguals’ social network and neighborhood-level language exposure jointly predicted their attitudes of solidarity toward a language, as well as their attitudes toward the protection of minority languages. The authors argue that while most studies have examined language experience in a unidimensional nature, their study investigated multilingual language attitudes by considering multiple systems within a social-ecological framework. Taken together, their results suggest that several interrelated interpersonal and ecological systems are associated with language attitudes, which could have important implications for planning future language policies in multilingual societies such as Montreal.

International Journal of Bilingualism

April 25, 2023

en