• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 353

Part of Session 125: The legitimate speaker in a transforming political economy (Other abstracts in this session)

Legitimate language, legitimate speakers: who owns Canadian French?

Authors: Heller, Monica (1); Lamarre, Patricia (2)
Submitted by: Heller, Monica (University of Toronto, Canada)

This paper examines contemporary tensions over who counts as a legitimate speaker of Canadian French, as older ideas of language as embodied membership of an organic nation encounter newer ideas about language as a skill to be deployed by cosmopolitan participants in the globalized new economy. Drawing on ethnographic data from Quebec as well as other Canadian provinces where francophones constitute a minority, we will show how contemporary political economic conditions challenge ideas about what it means to be a francophone. Our data consist of individual and institutional expressions of varied interests in maintaining or contesting dominant modes of defining legitimate speakers, as illustrations of this change and explanations for the tensions involved in it.

Amidst persistent tensions between the authenticating value of the vernacular versus the modernizing value of the standard, we find that new actors are laying claim to being legitimate speakers of French. These include Canadians of British, indigenous and immigrant origin historically distinct from the ethnonational category of « francophones », as well as new arrivals from Europe and from former francophone colonies. At the same time, the traditional arbiters of linguistic legitimacy, who draw their authority from nationalist ideas about language, identity and nation, find themselves increasingly drawn into globalized networks and markets where their linguistic resources are differentially valued and where their authority is challenged.

Conflicts arise particularly in Quebec, but also in the heart of the francophone institutional network set up with the support of the federal government across Canada since the 1970s. These spaces have produced actors with a vested interest in maintaining control over closed and homogeneous markets, which persist through state investment in linguistic duality as a technique for managing diversity and containing francophone contestation. Those spaces both require new members for their own perpetuation, and have become significant sites of resource distribution in and of themselves, attracting new actors whose legitimacy must be established.

At the same time, French Canadian authenticity, acquired through successful nationalist mobilization, now has new value in a globalized market eager for real cultural experiences (e.g. through tourism or the arts) and authentic artefacts; authenticity is marked by linguistic means, while the marketing requires adaptation to the consumers. Quebec has been particularly successful in branding itself, although other regions of Canada, notably Acadie, have also had success, thereby liberating themselves from the domination of the Quebec market.

These shifting political economic conditions set the stage for tensions over who gets to decide what counts as French and who counts as a francophone, as a criterion for access to spaces which, while they were initially set up as a matter of national rights, now function as nodes in a complex global network characterized by mobility of goods and people. Multiple sources of authority compete in defining the legitimate speaker, as the authentic and the cosmopolitan occupy different positions on the changing scene.