Global Multilingualism, Local Bilingualism, Official Monolingualism : The Linguistic Landscape of Montreal's St. Catherine Street

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Global Multilingualism, Local Bilingualism, Official Monolingualism : The Linguistic Landscape of Montreal's St. Catherine Street
Abstract
The author documents the linguistic landscape of Saint Catherine Street, Montreal's major shopping thoroughfare. He explains that 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 of the downtown shopping street. By way of a systematic sampling of signs in the street's linguistic landscape, the author considers the interactions between federal policies of bilingualism, provincial laws strengthening the visibility of French, and local linguistic realities, and the impact of the global connectedness of both the ‘grassroots’ and the commercial world on the linguistic landscape in this street. The author points out that while the presence of French and English is largely instrumental in function, many instances of other languages are found to be motivated by more symbolic functions, driven, in no small part, by the globally encoded indexical meanings of the languages in question.
Publication
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Volume
Vol. 23
Issue
no. 6
Pages
708-723
Date
2020
Language
en
Citation
Leimgruber, Jakob R.E. “Global Multilingualism, Local Bilingualism, Official Monolingualism : The Linguistic Landscape of Montreal’s St. Catherine Street.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism Vol. 23, no. 6 (2020): 708–723.
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