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Public Lecture: Language and Canadian Media

When:
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

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Language and Canadian Media: Representations, Ideologies, Policies

Jean-Marc Dewaele and Kazuya Saito are happy to announce their very first public lecture. This lecture will feature Dr Rachelle Vessey (Birkbeck) on Friday January 20th at 18:00. Please mark your calendar and attend this event! In this talk, Rachelle will talk about her research as well as introduce her latest book entitled "Language and Canadian media: Representations, ideologies, policies."


Wine and refreshments will be offered at the end of the talk.

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Abstract


Language and Canadian media: Representations, ideologies, policies
Rachelle Vessey, Birkbeck, University of London

In a recent article for the Guardian, Charles Foran (2017) asks if Canada is "the world's first 'postnational' country". He reasons that the lack of a core national identity sets Canada apart, particularly when compared against the European model. One pillar of traditional nationalism is language, which is often argued to unify the country (notably relevant in the British context, see e.g. Peck, 2017). However, in the globalised world languages have also become assets for social and geographic mobility. Regardless of whether or not Canada is a 'postnational' country, it is clearly a context in which traditional pillars of national identity cannot be taken for granted, and one reason for this is the continued tension over the status and role of official languages.
Canada's two official languages (English and French) have presented challenges for national unity. Notably, although tools such as the media have been used to support the national project (Chartrand, 1986), traditional media such as newspapers tend to exist in parallel in English and French with little interaction between them. Therefore, while media have been effective in fostering national coherence through the streamlining of some debates, sometimes the result has been the creation of two streams one in English and the other in French. In other words, the medium becomes inherent to the message (Macluhan, 1964). The emergence of new media has presented new opportunities to bridge the linguistic gaps, but these have also introduced an influx of other international perspectives.
This paper summarises the findings from a series of case studies (Vessey, 2016) exploring the similarities and differences between English and French Canadian language ideologies (i.e. commonsense understandings of language) as articulated in the media. Using corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to mine large datasets of print newspapers, online news, commentary, and Twitter, findings show remarkable similarities across the English-medium data that stand in stark contrast to the findings from the French-medium data. Notably, English-medium national (Canadian) data often manifest language ideologies more aligned with English-medium international data than French-medium national (Canadian) data. The findings from this wide range of data suggest that Canada does not have a core set of language ideologies, which are often seen to be central for nation-building. This finding lends some credibility to the proposal that Canada is, if not postnational, then at the very least an alternative model of the nation-state for the 21st century.
Chartrand, M. (1986) Technological nationalism. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, X, 1-2, 196-220.
Foran. C. (2017). The Canada experiment: is this the world's first 'postnational' country? The Guardian. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/04/the-canada-experiment-is-this-the-worlds-first-postnational-country?CMP=share_btn_tw
Macluhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT Press.
Peck, T. (2017) Immigrants should be made to learn English on arrival to help integration in UK, parliamentary report finds. The Independent. Thursday January 5. Available: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/chuka-umunna-immigrants-should-be-made-to-learn-english-on-arrival-in-uk-classes-esol-social-a7509666.html
Vessey, R. (2016). Language and Canadian media: Representations, ideologies, policies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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