‘No French, no more’: language-based exclusion in North America's first professional accounting association, 1879–1927

Abstract

1 The title takes its inspiration from Zachary Richard's song ‘No French, no more’, which describes the experience of French speakers and their forced assimilation into the English school system in Louisiana. Although strictly recounting Acadian and Cajun history, Zachary Richard's songs are widely received as emblematic of North American Francophone history in general. This paper draws on Bourdieu's sociolinguistic theory to interpret the overrepresentation of Anglophone accountants vis-à-vis Francophone comptables in the formative years of North America's first professional accounting association. In a linguistic market, where English was taken for granted as the official language of commerce, we find that the founding members of the Association of Accountants in Montreal (AAM) possessed a ‘distinctive’ cultural and linguistic habitus. We observe that the AAM enacted for many years a number of exclusion strategies to effectively limit its admittance of Francophone compatibles who possessed a different cultural and linguistic habitus. When the AAM eventually did explicitly embrace Francophone memberships, this was in order to counter the threat of a rival accounting designation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.