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

Negative and Positive Assimilation, Skill Transferability, and Linguistic Distance

There are two complementary models of immigrants' economic and social adjustment -- the positive assimilation model of Chiswick (1978, 1979), and the negative assimilation model of Chiswick and Miller (2011). The negative assimilation model is applicable for immigrants from countries that are very similar in terms of the transferability of skills, culture, and labor market institutions to the host country, and has been tested previously primarily using migration among the English-speaking developed countries. This paper generalizes the negative/positive assimilation models through analyzing the post-arrival learnings profiles of immigrants in the US from non-English-speaking countries according to the linguistic distance of their mother tongue from English. Using data on adult male immigrants from the 2000 US Census, it is shown that all groups of immigrants from non English-speaking countries are characterized by positive assimilation. Earnings in the immediate post-arrival period are lowest for the language groups furthest from English, and the increase in earnings with duration is steeper the further the immigrant's mother tongue is from English. The linguistic distance of the immigrants' mother tongue from the destination language appears, therefore, to play a crucial role in generating the inverse relationship between post-arrival earnings growth and the initial earnings disadvantage documented in most studies of immigrant earnings

RECONSTRUCT THE IDENTITIES ON CULTURAL AND LANGUAGE TRANSITION IN TAIWAN

Since 1980s, the marriage pattern in Taiwan has had a huge change for a large number of female immigrants both from Southeast Asia and Mainland China started to immigrate to Taiwan. It is called “Marriage Migration.” Researches concerning female immigrant spouses’ homeland cultures and familial identities were seldom discussed; however, it is till recent years that the stories of those female immigrants were fully presented/ represented by means of various narratives. For instance, many films, photos, and the contexts exquisitely depict conflicts between female immigrants and their cross-cultural marriages, families, children and even their families of origin. There are three kinds of narratives in immigrants’ writing: oral/confessional narrative, textual narrative, and documentary films. The first is based on female immigrants’ description orally with their own languages and then being translated into Chinese, or they write with simple Chinese. For example, the Taiwanese female artist, Lulu Shur-tzy Hou, played as a medium in depicting seven female immigrant spouses by means of the firstperson monologue in her three episodes Look Toward the Other Side: Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan (2005-2009). These episodes probed into the question of spouses’ self-identity whilst living in an exotic place. Then, the Textual narrative tends to focus on the mother-daughter relationships and Pepe Wu’s three short stories in Moving Skirts will be discussed. It usually illustrates the mother figures with madness, aphasia, or also absence from home. All mothers are silent without voices. Finally, in the documentary films, Out/Marriage and Let’s not be Afraid display that women not only play as mothers, wives, daughter-in-laws, but as a defenders to protect their rights. This research will explore the following issues in female immigrants from Southeast Asia in Taiwan: (1) cultural and National identities; (2) motherhood and the mother-daughter relationships; (3) narrative writing. It will definitely provide a new perspective in Asian ethic and women’s writing and set up a landmark toward research possibilities of diasporic females studied by the approaches of displacement

'And a sword will pierce your soul also’: reflections on the holy mother and the holy child

This article explores themes of maternal purification and the separation of mother and child through close attention to the presentation narratives in Luke 2. It draws upon cultural theory, artistic representations of the narratives and theological reflection upon experience to address the ambiguities of the maternal relation. It suggests that a recovery of this ambiguity is a necessary not only for understanding this particular biblical event but also our relations with the divine