Resumen de Exploring attitudes towards French, English, and code-switching in Manitoba (Canada)
Maria Rodrigo-Tamarit, Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez
This study contributes to the understanding of attitudes towards monolingual and code-switched varieties by examining the perceptions of 95 bilinguals towards Manitoban French, Canadian English and code-switching in Manitoba, a Canadian province where French is a minority language with official federal status. By means of a matched-guise test, we explore French-English bilinguals’ social evaluations of the three linguistic varieties and examine how these social evaluations vary according to participant characteristics (i.e. age, gender, mother tongue, origin, and sociocultural identity). In our experiment, participants listened to a speaker using Manitoban French, Canadian English and code-switching and rated each guise on several solidarity and status traits. Results from the cumulative link mixed effects models reveal that French and English are rated similarly for status. Overall, both French and English elicit feelings of attachment, but a preference towards French emerges among participants born in Manitoba. Code-switching is rated lower than the monolingual varieties in most status and solidarity traits, which indicates that our participants implicitly value linguistic purism. However, results also show that participants born in Manitoba and those with French as their mother tongue ascribe covert prestige to code-switching.
