Pratiques, attitudes et représentations linguistiques à Riverview, Nouveau-Brunswick

Abstract

New Brunswick is one of the ten provinces of Canada. It has the particularity of being the only one that is officially bilingual. This makes its linguistic situation unique in Canada. English and French are nevertheless not equally represented on this territory. We went to Riverview, a town that has only 8% of French speakers, against 92% of English speakers, to see what people think of this situation and how they deal with it in their everyday life. As we will see, almost all French speakers are bilingual. On the contrary, this is not the case for the English speakers. We will see that, even though English speakers expect French speakers to speak English to them and have sometimes a bad opinion of French and French speaking people, they tend to wish that the situation evolves to a more equal bilingualism. Also, they seem to be affected by the lack of means being at their disposition to learn French correctly.