Unpacking the raciolinguistic ideologies of social mobility in late capitalism

Adopting a structuralist approach, scientists classically conceived of upward social mobility as a desirable outcome, signs of an economy where workers ‘have a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the families to which they were born’ (Sawhill & McLanahan Reference Sawhill and McLanahan2006:4). I meanwhile adopt a critical constructivist approach to understand social mobility as a concept central to the imagination and management of difference in modernity (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs2003). As a concept, social mobility discursively ties together the unequal distribution of resources to the constitution of subjects. As such, language ideologies are central in the colonial, racial, and gendered formation of the ideal upwardly mobile subject.

Historically, in structural approaches to class, analysts would distinguish between manual and intellectual labor, the first considered to be unskilled or semi-skilled labor, while intellectual labor was understood as skilled (Grusky Reference Grusky2008). Language was central in the production of this division of labor: skilled employment required the acquisition of standard languages and the ability to read and write legitimated and unequally distributed by the school system. This classification of labor served to reproduce the idea that upward social mobility could be attained by mastering the linguistic practices valued in education (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1982; Heller & Martin-Jones Reference Heller and Martin-Jones2001). This ideal subject conversely produced and legitimated its counterparts: the deficient, inappropriate, or unskilled speaking subject. This converse subject could not speak, at least not in ways audible by the project of modernity (Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossbert1988; Lo Reference Lo2020; Flores & Rosa Reference Flores and Rosa2023). Not surprisingly then, the participant's understandings of social mobility rendered visible the implicit classed and racial presuppositions about one's ‘rightful place’ in the labor market.

Economic and political forces have amplified the embeddedness of language in producing selection in the labor market. These are tied to the unequal distribution of resources through sociohistorical processes of imperialism and colonization and the ways languages become implicit or explicit markers of racialisation. Using Mena & García's (Reference Mena and García2021) concept of ‘converse racialization’, Piller & Bodis observe that:

Centered on adaptability, flexibility, and entrepreneurial selves, the neoliberal discursive regime at times fragments the prescriptivist language ideologies that were central to modernity, and at times reproduces them.

When ethnographic design encounters raciolinguistic ideologies

Originally, this research aimed to understand the links between social mobility and language ideologies as well as to capture the effects of occupation on linguistic representation and the reproduction of language ideologies. Relying on the literature on language and commodification in Canada (Boudreau & Dubois Reference Boudreau, Dubois and Chevalier2007; Heller Reference Heller2010; LeBlanc Reference LeBlanc2010), I chose to work with French-English bilingual entrepreneurs, public and parapublic workers, and resource extraction workers. Each of these sectors were of interest for the changing political economic landscape of Canada. Entrepreneurs are central to ideologies of the added value of French and French-English bilingualism (Da Silva & Heller Reference Da Silva and Heller2009). Canadians often understand the public and parapublic sectors as driving the valuation of French-English bilingualism in Canada. Meanwhile, policy makers and community leaders often construct resource extraction workers as problematic because of their geographic mobility (Heller et al. Reference Heller, Bell, Daveluy, McLaughlin and Noël2015; McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin, Gonçalves, Kelly-Holmes and Pennycook2021a). These three groups of workers thus allow for a contrast in terms of theories of social class and upward mobility.

My team and I used an ethnographically informed life-course method to follow how white-collar and blue-collar francophone Canadians experience language and work in the language ideological configuration of late capitalism. We carried an institutional ethnography of places of governance where policy makers and business owners discussed language qualifications. For the oil sands, we studied job advertisements (McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin, Gonçalves, Kelly-Holmes and Pennycook2021a). We collected, for each field of employment, documents that talked about employment and skills. We also carried out thirty-seven life-course interviews focused on language and access to work for French-English bilingual workers originally from New Brunswick. To get a clearer picture of social mobility, we asked participants about their parents’ employment, education, and, when possible, proximate income.

The first group was constituted of ten entrepreneurs, tourism, language, and education workers born and based in Northern New Brunswick. These were aged from eighteen to forty-five, with most of them being in their thirties. They were mostly middle class and held university degrees or were in a university program. Six of them identified as women. In all cases, at least one of their parents held a white-collar job.

We also interviewed twelve oil sand workers who lived in New Brunswick but worked 7,000 kms away in the Albertan oil sands. This group is composed of three women and nine men. We purposefully recruited for women, who are still a minority in the sector. They were all in their late twenties to early thirties. Four participants had community college degrees that lasted from six months to ten months in welding or esthetics, one had a university degree in engineering, one had dropped out of school but later went to get a general education degree. Promotions are dependent on certifications on the oil sands. Participants combine two pathways to get these certifications: (i) by getting hours of on-the-job apprenticeship recognized by a union, and (ii) by following two to eight weeks courses (called blocks) in community colleges. Continued education was a practice in this group: all but two participants would regularly return to college for short two to eight weeks programs to get qualifications that helped them get promotions. Most participants combined both pathways, while one relied purely on the apprenticeship system and one worked in cleaning, where it seemed less relevant. For five of them, both parents held blue-collar employment, while the seven others had at least one parent who was either a business owner, a financial analyst, or public servant (including teachers). Three of them had parents who now also worked on the same teams as them in the oil sands.

Finally, we met with fifteen public servants and parapublic workers who had moved from New Brunswick to Ottawa. They were aged twenty-four to fifty-five at the time of the study, the median age being close to thirty. Eight of them were women. They all held or were working on master's degrees. All of their parents held white-collar employment.

While questions of racialization and Indigeneity were not explicit in the research grid, these topics appeared in the data when we asked about colleagues, multilingualism in the workplace, and their own language practices and representations. Of the thirty-seven participants, all were born in Canada; one identified as Black and one as Asian-Canadian. Both worked in the public sector. None identified as First Nation, Inuit, or Metis. The research design focused on the geographic and social mobility of bilingual workers from a region in demographic decline (New Brunswick). This explains the under-representation of each category. The region historically attracted few immigrants, and the trend continues today, in spite of municipal, provincial, and federal policies meant to foster the attraction, inclusion, and retention of immigrants (Sall Reference Sall2021). Meanwhile Indigenous populations have a differentiated access to French-English bilingualism in Canada, for a number of reasons, the efforts to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages chief among them (Haque & Patrick Reference Haque and Patrick2015; Nasager Reference Nasager2020).

In the analysis, I discuss an excerpt showcasing overt racism. While I was trained in critical ethnography to pay attention to how discourses construct social inequalities and to pay attention to neoracism (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2022) and raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa & Flores Reference Rosa and Flores2021), I had not prepared the research team to respond to racism while interviewing. I am responsible for the fact that the (white) research assistant found herself unprepared to deal with this methodological ‘fraught terrain’, where the extractive capitalist practices of the oil sands relied on colonial ideologies to erase Indigenous, migrant and black voices and produce the classed subjectivities we were documenting (Liboiron Reference Liboiron2021). Here the interactional order of the interview setting colluded with the participant-centred approach we favoured in our qualitative methodologies and the interviewer changed the topic. It is telling of my own flawed and ‘contaminated’ positionality (Liboiron Reference Liboiron2021) that while designing a project on labour, language, and class inequalities, I had not anticipated overtly racist comments. Regardless, as a critical researcher I chose to acknowledge and analyse these instances. Here it led me to follow the intersection between capitalism and raciolinguistic ideologies, and to investigate how those produce participants’ understanding of the world (Quraishi & Philburn Reference Quraishi and Philburn2016; Rosa Reference Rosa2019; Tupas Reference Tupas2019) and enable the reproduction of raciolinguistic practices and discourses in late capitalism.

The research design purposefully recruited for differences in three sectors of the labor market (public service, entrepreneurship, and oil sand extraction). In this article, I reconstructed the categories as white- and blue-collar to reflect the two differential subjective relationship to language and work that emerged in the analysis. Most research on language and commodification centers language in ways that make the practices themselves the material in the production of difference (Violette Reference Violette, Léger, McLaughlin and Urbain2023). Centering language was useful in making sense of the white-collar participants: they manifested a lot of linguistic insecurity, presented themselves as linguistically minoritized by English, and experienced anxieties related to language and social mobility. The blue-collar participants, however, expressed little in regards of linguistic anxieties. This brought me to decenter language to make sense of their experiences of the labor market, particularly in contrast with the public servants and the entrepreneurs. Yet, decentering language brought me right back to language, as the linguistic ideologies that organize work served to erase the role language played in producing labor for the late capitalist economy.

White-collar bilingualism: Language as politics in the production of the ideal speaker

Francophone white-collar participants were generally invested in and affected by the continued reproduction of prescriptivist language ideologies. This group believed the acquisition of standard forms of both French and English ensured upward social mobility in Canada. Specifically, they often thought that French, as a minority language, was harder to learn and practice in Canada, and so held the view that its acquisition required an early and long exposure through both family and education. Mélanie, a parapublic worker, summarizes this view in a government run workshop on early childhood education, through the idea of being “really bilingual”.

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For Mélanie, as well as most white-collar participants, the valued type of language acquisition informed sociopolitical orientations that are part of an emancipatory self and community project. Rosa (Reference Rosa2019) observes this same imbrication of projects of the selves as projects of community in his field work in Spanish-English bilingual schools, where language and class map onto the bodies of latinx students as potential promising young professionals espousing the valued norms of the community. In Francophone Canada, the iconization of French-English bilingualism became an injunction that in turn informed the overt norms of the group: “Parents must understand”. This community norm then either rendered problematic or erased the practices that fell outside of it all while simultaneously positioning as inferior or deficient the practices that differed from the desired ideal.

As a result, the white-collar participants who had children tried their best to enroll their children in francophone schools and to speak French to their children as a way to ensure the acquisition of the type of French valued in Canada. Mai, a parapublic worker, explained that she and her anglophone husband tried to speak French to their child: “Ben on veut principalement qu'il, qu'il parle français, qu'il soit francophone je sais pas c'est c'est la seule raison là (rit)” ‘Well we mostly want that he, that he speak French, that he be Francophone, I don't know it's the only reason (laugh)’. This was said against the backdrop of Mai being invested in the cultural value of multilingualism in the labor market. She herself spoke French, English, and Vietnamese and worked in an environment where her partner and many of her colleagues had French as a second language. Be it at home with her partner or with colleagues, Mai observed that her white-collar peers who didn't identify as having French as a first language could feel insecure in French, at times make mistakes, and fail to grasp the political stakes of being a minority speaker. She and her partner both spoke in French to their child, and Mai noticed her partner's timidity, effort, and deviation from standard French. Conscious of representing a normative standpoint that went against her allegiance to multilingualism, she hesitated significantly when trying to explain that, in spite of his efforts, her partner could still struggle to speak French competently.

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Mai valued multilingualism for many reasons: as a political project of diversity, as a way to recognize her own trajectory as a second-generation Vietnamese-Canadian, and as a member of the francophone community. Her relationship to the acquisition of French in Canada showcased the tension many middle-class Acadians now express—feeling a tension between wanting to recognize linguistic variation within a diverse community of speakers, some of whom have it as a second language, and a desire to ensure that their children acquire the standard form of it. The latter leads Mai to evaluate her partner's way of speaking French. Standardizing ideologies are thereby part of Mai's valuation of multilingualism.

The question of linguistic standardization is closely linked to an imagination of upward social mobility. Studying the linguistic prescriptions of French-Canadian grammarians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bouchard argues that the French spoken in Canada was devalued both by Canadians and Europeans following the French Revolution, an era marked by the French bourgeoisie taking over both political, economic, and linguistic power (Bouchard Reference Bouchard2011).

Linguistic standardization, be it in the francophone or anglophone world, served to police access to the emerging ‘democratic’ public space, in ways that rendered some bodies upwardly socially mobile while disqualifying others. Studying the rise of standard American English, Bongfiglio (Reference Bonfiglio2002) shows that standardization is more than a question of class warfare. Set against the forced, desired, or impeded geographic mobility of variously positioned colonial subjects, an ideology of race overtly informed the linguistic prescriptions of early twentieth-century grammarians, be it in the US, France, or Canada (Outram Reference Outram, Burke and Porter1987; Bongfiglio Reference Bonfiglio2002; Bouchard Reference Bouchard2011). Significantly, the increased value of literacy, which was then only readily available to the limited portion of the population who could access formal education, served to produce raciolinguistic understandings linking social mobility to specific ways of performing language.

To this day, the defense of standard French is a common ground of moral panic for francophone Canadian political and intellectual elites (Heller Reference Heller1999). The white-collar participants also semiotized class to express linguistic anxieties about downward social mobility. An analysis of this process reveals how embedded racio-ontological understandings of language map onto social mobility. Véronique, a parapublic worker and white mother to a two-year-old, showcased a high level of linguistic insecurity in both French and English, all while claiming to be proud of speaking Chiac, an Acadian variety of French. She was happy that her child's black daycare teacher was from a French-speaking African country for two reasons. First, Véronique believed the daycare worker spoke a better variety of French than the one that she and her husband spoke at home. Second, Véronique wanted her daughter to be open to diversity, in a way that I understand both as an exposure to transnational cosmopolitanism and anti-racist awareness. Véronique and her daughter inhabit a world where diversity, and an ability to navigate it, is often constructed as a moral and interactional good, one that can then be marketed as a skill in the bundle individuals offer to the global workplace (Gershon Reference Gershon2017; Urciuoli Reference Urciuoli2022).

In the excerpts below, the participant uses the word ‘ghetto’ to describe Chiac, the variety of French that she speaks. The use of ‘ghetto’ here indexes both the creativity and perceived disadvantages that speaking Chiac entails. This is a source of tension for Veronique, who says she is proud of Chiac, likely as an authenticating language that links her to her southern Acadian upbringing and as a member of a generation who fought for the recognition of linguistic variation (Boudreau Reference Boudreau2016; McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin, Urbain and Arrighi2021b). She constructs the black daycare worker as the one who will help a white middle-class child acquire the type of French and the cosmopolitan and anti-racist cultural soft skills her parents feel are key to ensure their child thrives both socially and economically. Yet, the use of the word ‘ghetto’ indexes the ways in which racialization and economic marginalization are linked in the linguistic ideologies that constitute linguistic hierarchies in Francophone Canada.

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Véronique has integrated the weight of standardizing linguistic ideologies and the classed and racial imaginaries that served to constitute them. She feels incompetent in both French and English, even as she holds a job in the public sector where she was evaluated for her abilities in both languages. What's more, by using the word ‘ghetto’ to express her ambivalence about Chiac, she participates in the reproduction of ideologies of languagelessness (Rosa Reference Rosa2019) that position bodies and linguistic practices along a continuum that simultaneously indexes racial assignation and class. Even as Véronique felt that racial equity was important, the language ideologies she navigated led to the reproduction of a language market that relied on the hierarchization, exploitation, erasure, and disqualification of linguistic practices along classed and racial lines.

Along with all other white-collar participants, Véronique, Mai, and Mélanie actively engaged in discourses touting the value of multilingualism as a gateway to social maintenance or upward social mobility. The reproduction of linguistic prescriptivism and, with it, linguistic insecurity led to challenges for certain participants as they sought to enter the labor market in bilingual regions of Northern New Brunswick. This, however, was not the experience of blue-collar participants, as I document in the next and last analysis section.

Bundled otherwise: Managing difference through language in the blue-collar labor market

The blue-collar participants did not express the same linguistic anxieties. They worked in an industry where language mattered, but it did not matter as a political project of the self, as with the white-collar workers. The participants showcased raciolinguistic beliefs more closely linked to either honouring cultural differences or defending one's position in the labour markets by invoking nationalist ideologies. Many blue-collar participants were proud of identifying as Acadians but tended to view French as a marker of ethnic belonging rather than a skill granting upward mobility or a political act. Blue-collar participants generally considered themselves Acadians by virtue of genealogy or geography. It should be noted that French was, for all blue-collar participants, the first language spoken at home.

Efficient communication is central in the oil sands: workers have to listen to security reports at the beginning of every shift (generally given in English), work in teams throughout the day (here French is regularly spoken as teams are composed of one's network from ‘back home’), and fill out written security reports at the end of the day (generally in English). Because of the centrality of communication, participants distinguished between languages and communication. Often, they reported choosing their career path because of deficit views of their skills in English and French (McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin, Gonçalves, Kelly-Holmes and Pennycook2021a). While laughing, Pierre, a scaffolder, tells us: “Moi je sais pas beaucoup écrire en français, imagine en anglais” ‘I don't know how to write in French very much, imagine in English’. Most of the participants said they struggled with ‘languages’ in school or in other sectors of the labour market but considered themselves to be efficient and agile communicators in the oil sands. In an economy where blue-collar work was increasingly valued, these participants did not feel the weight of standardizing views of language in the same way the white-collar participants did.

None of the oil sands participants felt that standardizing language practices were central to their work or advancement. Repeating a leitmotiv that was frequent in the oil sand data, Pierre reported that: “Ben tu peux faire des fautes pis c'est pas grave. Ils comprennent là” ‘Well you can make mistakes and it's not a big deal. They understand eh’. Collaboration around the linguistic aspect of the work meant that oil sand participants did not ascribe to the view that the acquisition of oral or written standard registers was key in upward social mobility. Linguistically, what was key was the ability to communicate efficiently in a high-risk team environment.

This perception also meant that while they held deficit views of their language skills, none of them felt it might limit their careers and only one of them expressed worry about his French becoming too anglicized. Instead, they all valued English as the linguistic skill to be acquired to access the job market. Alexandre's comment, below, contrasts his linguistic experience of the labor market to that of the school, concluding that once out of school, the linguistic variety spoken was irrelevant.

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While linguistic prescriptivism was not central in the oil sands, the participants showcased themselves as adept and culturally savvy communicators. The oil sands are a transnational plurilingual global space. Workers from all over the world cohabit within the space, be it as temporary migrant workers or, as with the participants, as Canadian citizens. Most participants reported interacting with workers from other parts of the world, namely Somalia and Mexico. A few of them included this contact in their reconceptualization of themselves as linguistically and culturally agile subjects. Danica, felt, for instance, that she was now more cosmopolitan and loved learning about other cultures and languages. Carl reported learning some Somali from his Somalian friends and using translation technology to communicate with them. He considered this linguistic practice to be both playful and respectful.

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This plurilingual transnational space could, however, be a site of tension for the workers. Oil companies often offered professional translators to international teams, a service rarely offered to francophone Canadians. The expectation seemed to be that Francophones born in Canada were either already bilingual or had the resources (i.e. networks) to adapt to the linguistic demands of the oil sands. Networks of solidarity were in place in the oil sands to ensure the production and acquisition of the necessary linguistic resources. These informal networks guaranteed that the linguistic demands of the work could easily be met. Pierre, for instance, asked an English-speaker for help when writing his security reports. Others often relied on the interpretation or translation to English of other bilingual colleagues, this, until they themselves knew enough English to become informal interpreters and translators. This linguistic organization of work reproduced ethnolinguistic networks amongst the groups of workers.

These groups could therefore experience tensions around language, racialization, and belonging. Danica managed cleaning teams for one of the biggest worker camps. In the following excerpts, she explained that there is competition over which network of workers was employed in the camp's laundry room, a job that many considered easier than the more physically demanding task of cleaning rooms. While she ran the services of that camp, the laundry team tended to be French-English bilingual from Eastern Canada. This camp was unionized and so workers from other networks, namely international workers, could be mandated to the laundry room as an accommodation. Danica reported that some of the francophone Canadian workers complained because this disrupted the ability to work in French.

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While the oil companies’ practice of hiring networks could ensure efficient communication, it also produced tensions around ethnolinguistic, racial, and citizenship categories. Philippe, another participant, used white nationalist understandings of Canada to naturalize the competition between Canadian English and French speakers, Canadian Francophones, and, in this specific case, Somalians. Philippe reported that most of the people he ‘chummed’ with in the oil sands were “des Anglais”,Footnote ¹ who gave him the nickname “Frenchie”. This nickname is frequent enough in Canada to be known as marking difference, often in a derogatory way. Philippe was aware of this and explained that there can be tensions between “Anglais” and “Français”. He then used nationalist understandings of belonging to denounce this prejudice, a move that leads him to hierarchical racist statements reproducing understandings of Canadian society as euro-descendant, white, and French-English bilingual, thereby disqualifying migrants and speakers of other languages.

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Philippe linked racial, linguistic, and nationalist discourse to assert a naturalized hierarchy of treatment in the oil sands. He constructed Canadian identity as white and therefore argued that (white) francophones and anglophone Canadians should treat each other equally. “You're white, you're white. You're a Canadian, you're a Canadian”. In doing so, he erased Indigenous claims to the territory as well as the centuries of migration to Canada from all parts of the world, most notably from former British and French colonies (Dua Reference Dua2007). This in turn led him to mobilize nationalist raciolinguistic ideologies about the migrant workers hired to work the oil sands. Philippe reported that these groups are “everywhere, speaking their language”. The research assistant brought the topic back to linguistic tensions between Anglophones and Francophones. This led the participant to the conclusion that the domination of majority groups over others is natural and inevitable: “If English weren't around here, we would probably do the same thing… It is what it is”. In the only overt token of racism in the data, racism was reproduced through the belief that different categories naturally exclude and discriminate against each other, and that euro-settler nationalism should be a basis for solidarity.

As the oil sands are a translinguistic and superdiverse space, language is central to the organization of work teams in ways that enable the acquisition of multilingualism and appreciation of social differences. The organization of work could, however, lead to linguistic, ethnic, and racial tensions and the reproduction of racist ideologies. Oil sands workers are networked and flexible subjects, negotiating themselves as entrepreneurs of themselves as languaged, nationalized, and racialized competitors in a global workforce. Here, ethno-nationalist competition over resources reproduces raciolinguistics ideologies.