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6 - Measured Multilingualism

Census Language Questions in Canada and the United States

from Part II - The United States Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2019

By
Jennifer Leeman
Edited by
Thomas Ricento
Thomas Ricento
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
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Summary

Since their widespread adoption in the nineteenth century, censuses have played both bureaucratic and ideological roles, as the classification of the population according to social and cultural characteristics facilitated the development of the administrative infrastructure required by emergent nation-states and the definition of national and group identity categories officialized particular ways of understanding difference. This chapter critically analyzes the questions about language asked by Statistics Canada and the US Census Bureau. I examine the relationship of language data to various policies in the two countries, as well as the ways that those policies, and specific ways of asking about language, reflect and reproduce particular ideologies of language. In addition to revealing differing perspectives on individual and societal multilingualism, this analysis demonstrates that census language statistics do not simply serve as "facts" undergirding policy, but instead produce particular representations of linguistic diversity and, thus, constitute official discourses on multilingualism.

Keywords

censuseslanguage ideologieslanguage policylanguage planninglanguage and nationalismmother tongue
Type
Chapter
Information
Language Politics and Policies
Perspectives from Canada and the United States
 , pp. 114 - 134
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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