2024/09/25 by Mireille McLaughlin · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Canadian Identity and History #Labor Movements and Unions #Multilingual Education and Policy
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0047404524000575
openalex publication_date 2024/09/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Showcasing how understandings of social mobility encoded raciolinguistic ideologies of the ideal upwardly mobile speaker, I investigate blue- and white-collar orientation to language, race, and social mobility in the Canadian labor market. I analyze these two subject positionalities and the way bundles of skills are ‘bundled otherwise’ when ideologies of race and language are invoked as relevant to a class experience. While the acquisition of standard languages remains understood as a gateway to upward mobility, the increased commodification of language made the acquisition of standard registers of French and English a skill amongst others, on par with any other. If this shift challenges an implicit ‘linguistic’ bias embedded in emic and scientific understandings of class, raciolinguistic ideologies continue to organize worker's orientations to language and work, be it to imagine themselves as cosmopolitan workers or to defend the positions of ethnic, national, and racialized groups in the economy. (Social class, raciolinguistics, work, language ideologies, francophone Canada, bilingualism)*