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Living in a vibrant and multicultural city such as Montreal exposes us to a variety of languages each day. Montreal’s linguistic mélange encourages us to consider how these different languages impact our perception of one another’s languages, and the key factors in this process.
In a study conducted in Montreal, Ruo Feng, a recent graduate from McGill’s Honours Psychology program, investigated the multilingual language attitudes of 123 French-English bilingual adults with emphasis on two common sociolinguistic metrics: Status and solidarity. She obtained data using self-report questionnaires that collected information about participants’ demographics and their attitudes toward languages.
“My first language is Mandarin, but growing up in Montreal, I’m fluent in both French and English,” Feng said in an interview with The Tribune. “With Quebec having many different French laws, I personally have my own attitudes about both languages.”
According to Feng, a central metric they studied was solidarity: The feeling of belongingness towards a given language.
“It’s much more personal in that way, whereas status is more so how valuable or important you think a language is, so it’s a little bit more removed from the self,” Feng said.
Feng explained that participants’ reported level of solidarity for their first language (L1) was lower for participants whose primary language was English, compared with those whose primary language was French.
“We thought that it could be because English is more like a lingua franca, meaning that it’s [a language] of globalization,” Feng said. This means that we may think of English as a universal language, which may help explain why for some individuals, it does not evoke a strong sense of belonging.
In the study, neighbourhood diversity—which they quantified by measuring the levels of variation and diversity within languages in a given neighbourhood—was investigated as a core environmental influence on language attitudes.
“The finding that resonated with me the most was that having more languages in your neighbourhood does affect your attitudes towards the importance of minority languages,” Feng said. “It speaks to the importance of respecting and honouring all these diverse languages that exist, especially as someone who speaks Mandarin, which is why I think it’s important to me.”
To quantify and explore these effects, Feng utilized the systems framework of bilingualism—developed in part by Debra Titone, a professor in McGill’s Department of Psychology—which suggests that bilingual individuals experience an interrelated system of linguistic influences that shape their language use and linguistic attitudes.
“Individual, interpersonal, and environmental factors affect people’s perceptions about different languages,” Feng said.
Interpersonal language dynamics are person-to-person interactions in daily life within various contexts. Feng quantified this in her study using language-tagged social networks. The findings indicate that having a more interconnected French-speaking personal network was associated with more positive solidarity attitudes toward French.
Next, ecological language dynamics refer to the broader, physical network of language exposure, such as your neighbourhood, work, or school environment. Feng measured ecological language dynamics using Canadian Census data.
“The findings of our cities are important because having a diverse neighbourhood of different languages can have an influence on our attitudes about those diverse languages, like in the workplace or in organizations,” Feng said.
Thirdly, societal language dynamics encompass the political and sociocultural contexts in which individuals live. These dynamics are particularly complex in Quebec due to the provincial government’s language laws, such as Bill 101 and Bill 96. While Feng did not examine these dynamics, they remain an important aspect of studying bilingualism.
Although there is much more research to be done, studies such as Feng’s provide insight into the factors that shape language attitudes. Since Montreal poses a unique case of a population governed by Bill 96, Feng explained the importance of looking outward to other multilingual cities to determine whether her findings are common across multilingual environments, or are impacted by Quebec’s unique political situation.
Moving forward, a more holistic understanding of language attitudes, along with advanced quantitative tools, can significantly benefit language planning policies in multicultural societies, including Montreal.
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