Language choice, social institutions, and symbolic domination

TLDR

Language choice and code‑switching reveal how ethnolinguistically diverse social institutions exercise symbolic domination. The article investigates how ethnic and institutional power relations intersect in French‑language minority education in Ontario, Canada, and the constraints they impose. The study analyzes two classrooms to examine how program structure, curriculum content, and turn‑taking organization support or undermine institutional monolingualism and how students use language to collaborate or resist. The analysis shows that institutional monolingualism is both reinforced and challenged by program design, and that these dynamics generate paradoxes and new power relations within the school. Keywords: symbolic domination, language choice, code‑switching, French/English contact, social institutions, Canada.

Abstract

ABSTRACT The study of language choice and code-switching can illuminate the ways in which, through language, social institutions with ethnolinguistically diverse staff and clients exercise symbolic domination. Using the example of French-language minority education in Ontario (Canada), this article examines the ways in which ethnic and institutional relations of power overlap or crosscut, forming constraints which have paradoxical effects. In an analysis of two classrooms, it is shown how an ideology of institutional monolingualism is supported or undermined by program structure, curriculum content, and the social organization of turn-taking, and how individuals use language choices and code-switching to collaborate with or resist these arrangements. The effect of these processes is to contain paradoxes and to produce new relations of power within the school. (Symbolic domination, choice of language, code-switching, French/English language contact, social institutions, Canada)