‘My parents may not be French sir, but I am’: exploration of linguistic identity of Francophone bilingual youth in transition in multicultural, multilingual Ontario

Abstract

Drawing on discursive data collected during an 18-month reflexive critical ethnography of the transition to postsecondary education, this paper explores how graduates of a French first-language secondary school in Ontario, Canada, struggle to affirm their linguistic identity in their new academic and social communities. Despite not crossing geopolitical boundaries, they have crossed borders as they integrate new, more culturally diverse but narrow language ideology spaces quite different from their high school linguistic community and their family environments. After a lifetime of seamless crossing over and back between two linguistic realities (Francophone and Anglophone), as invisible and inaudible minorities, these students have no experience of having their linguistic identity contested by peers or figures of authority, whether Francophone or Anglophone. They are unprepared for the social exclusion that begins prior to graduation when their linguistic loyalty is questioned in their home communities based on the language of instruction of their chosen postsecondary institution. They are further unprepared for the social exclusion that ensues in postsecondary milieus when confronted by homogeneous ideologically narrow conceptions of linguistic identity.

Keywords:

• linguistic identity
• linguistic loyalty
• Francophone
• Canada
• minority

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Prof. Julie Byrd Clark of the University of Western Ontario for organising the panel that led to this special issue of the IJM; and for her comments and useful feedback in the writing of this paper; and the reviewers for their clear and constructive suggestions which helped guide me through the revision process. I also wish to extend my gratitude to the University of Ottawa Centre for Academic Leadership's Writing in the company of others initiative for providing the creative, dialogic space where this paper was initially drafted.

Notes

1. A Politique d'aménagement linguistique is expected for the Francophone and bilingual Training, Colleges and Universities division in Fall 2011.

2. The names of the secondary school and all participants have been changed to provide anonymity.