Bilingualism, language shift, and institutional support for French: the case of the Franco-Ontarians.

This paper provides some background information on Ontario's French-speaking minority and examines patterns of bilingualism and shift to English among that community and identifies the sociolinguistic conditions favoring such a shift. Following this, the article will document and reflect upon a relatively recent sociopolitical development that could play a crucial role in the fight against linguistic assimilation, namely the expansion of French into the official domains of Ontarian society. From a sociohistorical perspective, the Franco-Ontarian community's transition from monolingualism to bilingualism is to be seen as a useful and probably inevitable adaptation to the surrounding English-speaking environment, since it allows better integration into it, a reality that Franco-Ontarians readily acknowledge themselves. Given that they emigrated to their new host environment out of a desire to improve their lot in life, that they relocated in localities where French often does not rank high on prestige, usefulness, and visibility, and that they are in the process of losing their traditional French-Canadian identity, it is perhaps not hard to understand why an increasingly large proportion of Franco-Ontarians go one step further and do not transmit French to their children, all the more if they enter into a linguistically mixed marriage.