Language, mobility and (in)security: A journey through Francophone Canada

The proposed journey focuses on localised groups of French speakers in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec and Alberta but also on transient workers that go back and forth to their workplace and military families who are relocated at regular intervals within the country. Linkages between language, mobility and (in)security are assessed through the analysis of linguistic variables that illustrate the enactment of local norms of interaction among mobile Canadian French speakers. Continuities among groups that may superficially appear, and are often theorised, as disconnected become prominent. I ultimately suggest that Francophone Canada is best grasped as a set of multilingual speech communities rather than as a unidimensionally conceived series of groups sharing the exclusive commonality of speaking French.