Face-to-face interaction in the multilingual workplace: Social and political aspects of language use in Montreal.

摘要

This ethnographic study explores the language choice decisions of female, working-class immigrants in an on-the-job training center specialized in industrial sewing in Montreal. It aims to describe how Arabic and Bengali speakers use language to maintain or cross cultural boundaries at work. These choices are explained in terms of localized language practices and larger issues connected to language ideologies and economic control.; Observations and interview data, collected on site as well as with government officials and union representatives, were used to articulate the official linguistic stance in Quebec. Mainstream society and immigrants agree that fluency in French is essential for successful integration in Montreal. The means for acquiring the language being clearly insufficient, discourses are in fact manufacturing consensus regarding the linguistic issue for immigrants. Once this is achieved, mainstream society can justify the ghettoization of the job market and exploitation of immigrants by arguing that getting a low-paying job is the best newcomers can achieve considering their limited language skills. Concurrently, the host society fails to provide adequate access to language training.; At the micro-level, the distributional patterns of the conversational data show that there are different sets of norms regulating language selection on the worksite. Among immigrants, language boundaries are largely maintained: workers overwhelmingly interact with members of their own linguistic group in a language other than French or English. A sequential analysis of the occasional L2 conversations shows that interaction between groups serves two purposes: (1) collaboration on work-related issues and (2) negotiation of cultural boundaries through their L2. In addition, codeswitching can be used to flag a wrong language selection or distance oneself from a co-participant.; The maintenance of language boundaries is interpreted using the political economy model (Woolard 1985, Gal 1987, Heller 1992, Simmons 1999). Since immigrants' ability to fully integrate the linguistic marketplace remains inadequate, this unequal distribution of language resources encourages minority groups to develop parallel linguistic/economic markets. Language choice decisions are made according to local norms---choices that empower these workers in a context where economic concerns trump linguistic ideology in the province's efforts to integrate immigrants.