Psychological and sociodemographic correlates of communicative anxiety in L2 and L3 production

This paper analyses foreign language anxiety in the French L2 and English L3 speech production of 100 Flemish students. The findings suggest that foreign language anxiety is not a stable personality trait among experienced language learners. The societal as well as the individual contexts were found to determine levels of communicative anxiety. The perception of French as the former prestige language in Flanders and its function as a social marker was found to be linked to the participants' social class, which was, in turn, linked to levels of anxiety in French - but not in English. This social effect appeared to be a stronger predictor of communicative anxiety in French than three personality variables (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism). Psychoticism, extraversion, and, to a lesser extent, neuroticism did however significantly predict levels of communicative anxiety in English L3 production. Students who scored high on the extraversion and psychoticism scales reported significant lower levels of communicative anxiety in English. Those who scored low on the neuroticism scale also tended to report lower levels of communicative anxiety in English. The same pattern emerged for communicative anxiety in French without reaching statistical significance

Sociodemographic, psychological and politicocultural correlates in Flemish students' attitudes towards French and English

An analysis of 100 Flemish high-school students' attitudes towards French and English (both foreign languages) revealed complex links etween personality factors, gender, politicocultural identity, communicative behaviour and foreign language attitudes. Attitudes towards English were found to be much more positive than those towards French, despite the fact that the participants had enjoyed a longer and more intense formal instruction in French (it being their second language). The independent variables were found to have stronger effects for French than for English, with the exception of politicocultural identity of the participant, which had a strong effect on attitudes towards French but not English. Overall, it seems that social factors, including exposure to the foreign languages, are linked with lowerlevel personality dimensions and thus shape attitudes towards these languages

Whose French is it anyway? Language ideologies and re-emerging indexicalities of French in Flanders

AbstractIn this article I address a number of recent controversial language-related incidents and ideological statements regarding the use of French in the public sphere by Flemish nationalist aldermen in two Flemish towns. By drawing on interviews with different stakeholders (shop owners, aldermen, and passers-by), I address the different perceptions and ideological indexicalities of French shop names and signs in these Flemish contexts. In the data, the indexical field (Eckert 2008) of French in Flanders emerges as both polyvalent and indexically ordered, while the Flemish nationalist interpretations involve rescaled and historically recursive indexical meaning that can only be understood vis-à-vis the historical language ideological debate in Belgium. Language use in the public sphere has thus become a tool to impose monolingual ‘doxic logics’ (Bourdieu 1977) in Flanders, in spite of the fact that commercial and private language use is not regulated by language laws in Belgium. (Flemish nationalism, language ideologies, linguistic landscape)*</jats:p

Assimilation in Multilingual Cities

Using the Public Use Microdata Files of the 2001 and 2006 Canadian Censuses, we study the determinants of the assimilation of language minorities into the city majority language. We show that official minority members (i.e. francophones in English-speaking cities and anglophones in French-speaking cities) assimilate less than the "allophones" (the individuals with a mother tongue other than English or French), and that immigrants generally assimilate less than natives. In addition, the language composition of cities is shown to be an important determinant of assimilation both for allophones and for official minorities. Finally, we show that assimilation into French in French-majority cities is lower than assimilation into English in English-majority cities even when controlling for the language composition of the cities and including a rich set of language dummmies.immigration, assimilation, language policies, minorities

Belgium’s legal periodicals as vectors of translation policy : how Flemish legal journals contributed to the development of a Dutch legal language

Belgium’s national history has been characterized by linguistic issues. As soon as Belgium gained independence in 1830, French was promoted as the nation’s first and most important language, despite the fact that a large majority of its people spoke Flemish. Constitutionally, the choice of which language to use was free, but the legal world easily adopted French. Flemish was only able to loosen the yoke of French during the final quarter of the nineteenth century, after a few sensational court cases. Jurists played a primordial role in the use of Flemish as a full-fledged legal professional language and one of their instruments were legal periodicals. Editors and authors used their position to offer colleagues translations of legal terminology, and gave guidelines as to how Flemish could and should be used in the Flanders court rooms (in Wallonia, French was used exclusively). This article examines the works that promoted the idea of Flemish as a professional legal language and the methods that were seen as the best way to reach the goal of a unilingual legal world in Flander

English as the Lingua Franca and the Economic Value of Other Languages: the Case of the Language of Work of Immigrants and Non-immigrants in the Montreal Labour Market.

With data from the 2006 Canadian census, we investigate the determinants and the economic values of different languages used at work in the Montreal metropolitan area. The working population is divided into three mother tongues groups: French, English and Others. Three indicators are defined: use of French at work as a second language, and use of an official language at work as opposed to an non-official language. One interesting result is that there is no relationship between schooling and the use of French at work for the English mother tongue group, while schooling is positively related to the use of English at work for the French mothe tongue group and to the use of an offical language at work for the Other mother tongues group. We look at the returns to using a second language at work by means of earnings regressions (with both OLS and IV to account for the endogeneity of the language of work). We find that for the English mother tongue group, using French at work does not pay. In contract, there is a high payoff to using English at work for the French Mother tongue group. For the Other mother tongues group, there is a high payoff to using an official language at work and a modest one to using English instead of French.language of work, mother tongue, immigrants, Montreal, earnings