Exploring attitudes towards French, English, and code-switching in Manitoba (Canada)

ABSTRACT

This study contributes to the understanding of attitudes towards monolingual and code-switched varieties by examining the perceptions of 95 bilinguals towards Manitoban French, Canadian English and code-switching in Manitoba, a Canadian province where French is a minority language with official federal status. By means of a matched-guise test, we explore French-English bilinguals’ social evaluations of the three linguistic varieties and examine how these social evaluations vary according to participant characteristics (i.e. age, gender, mother tongue, origin, and sociocultural identity). In our experiment, participants listened to a speaker using Manitoban French, Canadian English and code-switching and rated each guise on several solidarity and status traits. Results from the cumulative link mixed effects models reveal that French and English are rated similarly for status. Overall, both French and English elicit feelings of attachment, but a preference towards French emerges among participants born in Manitoba. Code-switching is rated lower than the monolingual varieties in most status and solidarity traits, which indicates that our participants implicitly value linguistic purism. However, results also show that participants born in Manitoba and those with French as their mother tongue ascribe covert prestige to code-switching.

KEYWORDS:

• Matched-guise test
• attitudes
• bilingualism
• French
• code-switching
• Canada

Acknowledgement

This study is partially based on the first author’s MA thesis and was supported by Research Manitoba under the 2018 Research Manitoba Master’s Studentship; and the Faculty of Arts, The University of Manitoba under the 2019 J. G. Fletcher Award. An early version of this paper was presented at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 23 in Hong Kong. (SS23). We would like to thank all our participants, as well as all our colleagues, friends, and acquaintances who helped us translate materials and recruit participants. We also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors are, of course, our own. This research has been approved by The University of Manitoba Research Ethics Board (REB). The following are the approval numbers given: J2019:051, J2019:074, J2020:003 and J2020:025.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In 1969, the Official Languages Act declared both English and French official languages of Canada, requiring federal institutions and agencies to provide services in both languages. In 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed minority language educational rights to French-speaking communities outside Quebec.

2 For example, the Bilingual Service Centres Act (2012) ensures the efficiency and maintenance of bilingual service centres (Government of Manitoba 2020; The Bilingual Service Centres Act 2012), and the Francophone Community Enhancement and Support Act (2016) supports and promotes the use of French, including its presence in provincial agencies (The Francophone Community Enhancement and Support Act 2016). Programs such as the French Second Language Revitalization Program and the Program for the Enrichment of French Education have also been created to provide financial support to schools and organizations promoting the use of French language in education (Bureau de l’éducation française 2019b, 2019a).

3 While it is true that the proportion of French-English bilinguals in Manitoba falls below the national rate (8.3% vs. 18%), it should be noted that the national average of bilingualism is skewed by the proportion of bilinguals in New Brunswick (34%), Canada’s only officially bilingual province, and in Quebec (46.4%), the only province where French is the majority language (Statistics Canada 2022c, 2022d, 2022e, 2022f).

4 See Marchand (2004) for a description of the different French dialects spoken across Manitoba.

5 Three of these recordings are of speakers of exogenous French dialects analyzed in a verbal-guise test (Rodrigo-Tamarit and Loureiro-Rodríguez 2022). These recordings function as distractors in the current experiment.

6 Participants reported different levels of proficiency for both English and French, but this factor is not considered in the present analysis.

7 Nine participants indicated Manitoba as their origin while also reporting having moved to the province recently. These were categorized as Canadians or non-Canadians based on their reported identity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Manitoba [2018 Research Manitoba Master’s Studentship]; University of Manitoba [Faculty of Arts, 2019 J. G. Fletcher Award].

Notes on contributors

Maria Rodrigo-Tamarit

Maria Rodrigo-Tamarit is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Manitoba. She obtained her MA in sociolinguistics (2020) at the same university. Her research interest areas include sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and bilingualism. She has presented her work at several venues, such as the 11th Change and Variation in Canada (2019), the Sociolinguistics Symposium 23 (2021), and Sociolinguistics Symposium 24 (2022).

Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez

Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She received her PhD at the University of California, Davis. Her research includes work on language attitudes, global hip-hop, lyrical code-switching, multilingualism and nominal forms of address. Her work has appeared in volumes on Spanish sociolinguistics, as well as in Popular Music and Society, Spanish in Context, L2 Journal, Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Language & Communication, and Latino Studies.