Bilingualism And Multilingualism Essay

Introduction We all speak, whether with thundering silences, gestural signs, or words. The latter play such an important role in our lives that, according to Khalil Gibran, we are “lines written on water1”. More often than not, the words we speak create more than one language, hence the idea of bilingualism or multilingualism. Among other things, bilingualism and multilingualism are both key elements in translation, on an international scale. As François Grin writes in Translation and the Dynamics of Multilingualism2, translation “emerges from multilingual contexts and is therefore dependent on the latter3”. Since they play a key in the link between bilingualism and translation, language policies will be analyzed in the next pages.

In that regard, Donna Patrick writes, in her article5, that bilingual practices “shape new social identities and new ways of interacting socially, culturally, politically and economically6”, to which Monica Heller replies in her article7. While Patrick talks about a globalized perspective on the topic, Heller writes that bilingualism is “centrally linked to the construction of discourses of state and nation, and is therefore tied to the regulation of

This paper will reveal, later on, that, concretely, bilingualism is often seen as a pipe dream. The Trudeau-led federal government instated the Official Languages Act, in 1969. While it gave “statutory recognition to Canada 's linguistic duality17”, it nonetheless “stopped short of setting national objectives for bilingualism18”, which were set 20 years later, when the law was redefined by Parliament. The redefinition points included the “equality of English and French in federal institutions, especially with regard to the provision of services to the public, and a commitment to develop and strengthen Anglophone and Francophone minority communities, as well as promote the two official languages within Canadian