Language issues in Canada regularly spark controversy and fuel polarizing debates, which can then be echoed and amplified in the media and by citizens.

Following the accident in March at LaGuardia Airport in New York involving an Air Canada passenger jet, the company’s CEO, Michael Rousseau, delivered a message of condolence in English only, provoking a fierce outcry and extensive media coverage. Rousseau announced his resignation soon after.

Although English-Canadian media and Québec French-speaking journalists and commentators largely agreed that the monolingual message was inappropriate, the views expressed by the general public were more divided.

This was particularly obvious when it came to how Québec’s francophones responded to Rousseau’s choice of language.

To better understand how these controversies emerge and develop, sociolinguistics is helpful. Sociolinguists look not only at how language is used, but also at how people talk about language, and how those discussions are interpreted and take on meaning.

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Negative portrayals of Québec, bilingualism

As part of an ongoing study analyzing reactions to the controversy in the media, I have examined about 3,000 reader comments published in the comment sections of a series of articles in the The Globe and Mail. I wanted to know what these comments would tell us about the........

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