Linguistic Asymmetries, Relative Deprivation, Discrimination, Cosmopolitanism, and Localism Among Official Language Minorities : Three Studies on the Anglo-Quebecer and Franco-Ontarian Communities

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Linguistic Asymmetries, Relative Deprivation, Discrimination, Cosmopolitanism, and Localism Among Official Language Minorities : Three Studies on the Anglo-Quebecer and Franco-Ontarian Communities
Abstract
The author presents three studies on the Anglo-Quebecer and Franco-Ontarian communities using original survey data collected in 2017. The first study assesses Canada’s two official languages with updated census data, then compares how their status is perceived. He notes that evidence reveals that, while Canadian society is becoming increasingly multilingual, and while English and French are both losing ground as mother tongues and languages used most often at home, both are not equally used at work. The author contends that English is making progress in the province of Quebec as a language of work, whereas French is only rarely used by workers outside the province of Quebec and is becoming increasingly marginal in the province of Ontario. The author presents a group comparison that shows that Franco-Ontarians are much more likely than Anglo-Quebecers to judge that the language of the outgroup (or the language of the majority group) is “useful”. Conversely, Anglo-Quebecers are much more likely than Franco-Ontarians to judge that their own language, or the language of the ingroup, is “useful”. The second study presented by the auhor finds that there is evidence of a state of relative deprivation among Anglo-Quebecers respondents. The latter judge that their group is at a disadvantage in comparison with Francophones and consider their minority group to be the victim of discrimination in the province of Québec. Updated census data on family income of the majority and minority groups reveal that Anglophones are over-represented in the lower income brackets and under-represented in the middle categories, thus challenging conventional wisdom about Anglophones being a wealthy class of citizens in Quebec. Predictive models show that, contrary to expectations, the higher the state of relative deprivation and perceived discrimination, the lower the likelihood of being an organizational activist. The third study the author presents compares the strength of local, provincial, federal, and global affiliations of Anglo-Quebecers and Franco-Ontarians and examines whether organizational engagement is a determinant of belonging. Results reveal that organizational activists among both minority groups are less likely to identify as cosmopolitan than rank-and-file members and more likely to identify with other, more local types of affiliation.
Type
PhD dissertation
University
University of Toronto
Place
Toronto, ON
Date
2020
# of Pages
ix-200p.
Language
en
URL
Citation
Bonin, Pierre-Olivier. “Linguistic Asymmetries, Relative Deprivation, Discrimination, Cosmopolitanism, and Localism Among Official Language Minorities : Three Studies on the Anglo-Quebecer and Franco-Ontarian Communities.” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2020. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/103557/3/Bonin_Pierre-Olivier_202011_PhD_thesis.pdf.
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