Language Policy Outside the US – what I didn’t say

Based on Heller, M. 1982. Negotiations of language choice in Montreal. In J. Gumperz (ed.). Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Multiethnic/multilingual Quebec (as opposed to Miami):
Canada’s French/English uses reveal a lot about language’s symbolic role in political life. While the negotiation of language has to do with judgments of personal treatment, Heller points out that those judgments are dependent on social knowledge, like status difference. Between any two strangers anywhere around the world, encounters “are now political acts of choosing the right language.”

What does it matter what language you use as long as you’re polite or say what you mean?
A lot, apparently. Negotiation of language choice is vital. Take the English hospitals in Quebec, for example, where the clerks are supposed to be bilingual. The clerk tries to adapt to French or English for the patient who calls, but it’s hard to tell which is supposed to be used. It’s become conventionalized to start off a conversation by directly asking on the meta-level which language should be used, but that turns out to be awkward and unwanted. Thus, the fact that some people support bilingualism and others oppose it “has led to a strange dance in which code switching has multiple interpretations.” Selecting the wrong one can be bad and offend. What’s particularly interesting here is that the attempt by speakers in Quebec to conventionalize the negotiating strategies between the two languages reveals the way people make up norms where they are absent. It helps us know how to speak to each other without uh, feeling, um, awkward.