Vitality and ethnolinguistic attitudes of Acadians, Franco-Ontarians and Francophone Quebecers: two or three solitudes in Canada's bilingual belt?

Abstract

Do French-Canadian (FC) minorities in New Brunswick and Ontario remain as committed as majority Francophone Quebecers in developing their vitality within Canada's bilingual belt? FCs constitute host communities for interprovincial migrants of FC and English-Canadian (EC) background who can bolster or weaken the vitality of FCs. How FCs and ECs welcome each other as internal migrants has important consequences for Canadian nation-building, and harmonious relations between Francophones and Anglophones as official language communities. Questionnaires were completed by three groups of FC undergraduates: Francophone Quebecers (n = 204), Acadians (n = 227), and Franco-Ontarians (n = 227). All FC respondents identified positively as Francophones while declaring strong language skills in French and reported using more French than English in their everyday lives. FC respondents were more willing to personally mobilize to improve their French-Canadian vitality than outgroup EC vitality. FC participants felt more threatened by the presence of EC than FC migrants, preferred Francophone more than Anglophone migrants, and perceived that FC migrants contributed more to their ingroup vitality than did EC migrants. Implications are discussed based on the ‘two solitudes’ and 'three solitudes' hypotheses, and on the relationship between intergroup threat, zero-sum beliefs and the rejection by FCs of EC migrants.

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