Policy and Practice in Canada

Canada has been known as a country that is bilingual when it comes to language policy and multicultural when it comes to cultural diversity. However, while Canada’s immigrant population has grown significantly since the adoption of the official bilingualism and multiculturalism policies, newcomers are often left out of the scope of discussion on official languages. In fact, the discourse and research on official bilingualism have largely been shaped by promoting bilingualism primarily among Anglophone and Francophone communities. This book offers a conceptual framework that explains how the promoted official bilingualism and the dominant English reality are reconciled and explained and how immigrants’ voices are placed in the discourses on bilingualism in the monolingual and multicultural environment. It demonstrates that often a macro-level discourse on official bilingualism maintained and promoted by the government does not correlate with a micro-level discourse produced by new Canadians, and recommends further consideration of accommodating immigrants’ voices in the official bilingualism and multiculturalism discourses.