Identity and group belonging among anglophone youth of Montreal
As the product of a social construction, identity cannot be considered as being linear and fixed. Rather, identity is a fluid phenomenon that is strongly influenced by social practices, which are in turn embedded in specific power relations. This phenomenon is all the more true for linguistic minorities, since these live at the frontier between two languages and two cultures — and sometimes even three in the case of racial and ethnic minorities. The results of our analysis are drawn from an ethnographic study conducted in English schools in the Montreal area. At the end of three years of field study, the results indicated 1) the presence of a bilingual or trilingual identity among the young; 2) diverse representations of the anglophone community; and 3) the young participants conceded that they did not feel like they were a part of the French-speaking majority in the province; yet at the same time they did not express a sense of minority status in their relationship with the majority group.