Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Master of Arts

Program

Anthropology

Supervisor

Bell, Lindsay.

2nd Supervisor

Pennesi, Karen.

Co-Supervisor

Abstract

How do Anglo-Quebecers who have migrated to Ontario in the past 45 years perceive and negotiate their identity in relation to Quebec? Since 1971, 600 000 anglophones have left Quebec for other parts of Canada. This out-migration coincided with political tensions that influenced a complete economic and linguistic shift in power from English to French. The symbolic and literal reclamation of Quebec as a French province set the conditions for the partial erasure of the Quebec anglophone (Anglo-Quebecer) community and sense of identity. From a series of semi-structured interviews with anglophones who left Quebec within the past 45 years, I illustrate how Quebec’s monolingual French language ideology has created a sense of identity and community that is “uninhabitable” for Anglo-Quebecer out-migrants. These migrants are researchable as a community but are not socially accepted or visible as one in broader society. The French nationalist discourse in Quebec no longer recognizes their presence or their language. This study contributes to the broader research on Canadian linguistic minorities and decolonisation efforts in Quebec by focusing on the Anglo-Quebecers that migrated from the Montreal area to the Greater Toronto Area, where previous research has only focused on Anglophones still living in Quebec.

Summary for Lay Audience

This is a research project on one of Canada's two linguistic minority groups under law. It is an identity project on groups of Quebec anglophones. I questioned how Anglo-Quebecers who have migrated to Ontario in the past 45 years perceive and negotiate their identity in relation to Quebec due to the 600 000 anglophones who have left Quebec for other parts of Canada since 1971. This out-migration coincided with political tensions that influenced a complete economic and linguistic shift in power from English to French in Quebec. From a series of semi-structured interviews with anglophones who left Quebec within the past 45 years, I illustrate how Quebec’s monolingual French language ideology has created a sense of identity and community that is “uninhabitable” for Anglo-Quebecer out-migrants. These migrants are researchable as a community but are not socially accepted or visible as one in broader society. Anglo-Quebecers are part of an uninhabitable community because the French nationalist discourse in Quebec does not recognize their presence and actively excludes their language. Meanwhile, Anglo-Quebecers continue to signal their differences from other Canadian Anglophones (e.g. in Ontario) by displaying objects that reference their ties to Quebec, such as landscape paintings and sports memorabilia. Anglo-Quebecers have become accustomed to avoidance relationships where specific objects can either evoke negative or positive feelings about Quebec. In taking the concept of uninhabitable communities as a theoretical lens for research in multilingual environments, individual perspectives of identity and community can be seen to differ from discourse circulated by the structural systems of the nation-state. In thinking with this concept individual claims to authenticity from linguistic minority groups can be analysed alongside the structural systems of power that they are in tandem with throughout history.

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