Thirty Years After Bill 101: A Contemporary Perspective on Attitudes Towards English and French in Montreal

This paper presents a 2007 study that was conducted amongst 147 young anglophone, francophone and allophone Montrealers in order to shed light on their attitudes towards English and French in terms of status and solidarity. The study made use of both a questionnaire and a matched-guise experiment. The findings indicate that while a certain amount of status was attributed to French, most likely as a result of language policy and planning measures such as Bill 101, significantly more status was attributed to Englishmost likely a result of the utilitarian value that the language holds as the global lingua franca. Regarding the solidarity dimension, it appears that while the respondents recognised the social desirability of having an affective attachment to the French language, at a more private level, they held more positive attitudes towards English. These can tentatively be explained in terms of the respondents' social identity