Subtractive bilingualism: The case of Franco‐Americans in Maine's St John Valley

Abstract

The present study is part of an ongoing project which analyses the effects of ethnolinguistic vitality on the bilingual development of anglophones and francophones in Canada and the United States. The study, carried out in two school districts of the St John Valley in the state of Maine in the Unites States, compares three subgroups of francophones and anglophones on measures of the strength of their network of linguistic contacts in French and English, their communicative and cognitive‐academic linguistic proficiency in these languages, their vitality beliefs concerning the francophone and anglophone communities, the strength of their ethnolinguistic identities and their degree of use of French and English in various social domains. The results, which are interpreted within the framework of a macroscopic model of the determinants of additive and subtractive bilingualism, are very conclusive in showing that bilingualism for these Franco‐American students is strongly subtractive. The assimilation process observed in this study is attributed to the very low degree of schooling in the mother tongue in particular, and to the generally low level of ethnolinguistic vitality of the francophone community in spite of their strong demographic presence.