Language, Identity, and Investment: Trajectories of Purilingual Skilled and Well-Educated Immigrants in Intercultural Quebec

The author explores the trajectories of skilled and well-educated immigrants, their investment in language learning, identity construction, and integration in Montreal. Quebec receives professional and skilled immigrants to build up its economy and to promote Quebec’s identity and nationalism. The author notes that the province of Quebec has adopted intercultural policies to recognize linguistic diversity. These efforts, however, have been framed within a French language framework, with the Charte de la langue française (Bill 101) making French the official and everyday language in Quebec. The author explains that many immigrants who are selected through the Quebec Skilled Worker Program are well-educated and know multiple languages. Their plurilingual repertoires are further developed when they learn French and English in Quebec. The author investigates the experiences of plurilingual skilled immigrants as regards their expectations and concerns through their investment in language and integration. Informed by poststructuralist advances, the author sought to conceptualize the relationship between language and identity with ten skilled immigrants who had diverse social, cultural, and professional backgrounds. His findings reveal that participants perceived plurilingualism (after migration to Quebec) as cultural capital providing a sense of empowerment, should have resulted in gaining easy acceptance in the new society and its labour market. However, their unsuccessful employment scenarios and social adaptation disprove (or challenge) their earlier assumption. Overall, by examining participants’ narratives, the author’s study brings out three themes which principally guided his data collection: 1) investing in language learning strategies and cultural capital; 2) re-negotiating multiple identities in mobility; and 3) expressing a desire for greater social receptiveness. The author’s analytic framework strives to fill the gaps in the existing research on the language learning trajectories of adult immigrants and provides insights on the language learning and lived experiences of skilled immigrants in intercultural Quebec. The author concludes by elucidating how immigrants’ linguistic and social integration into the economic and sociocultural fabric of Quebec can be more seamlessly achieved.

PhD dissertation

McGill University

Montreal

2020

xiv-330p.

en