ABSTRACT
In this chapter we explore the complex interplay between individual and societal multilingualism. Our example here is Canada and we rely upon one of the prime examples of ethnographic fieldwork in sociolinguistics, namely the work carried out by Monica Heller and her team of co-researchers in a Frenchmedium school, the Ecole Champlain, in the anglophone province of Ontario. The study shows how Quebec as well as francophone communities in anglophone Canadian provinces attempted to achieve individual (French-English) bilingualism through an official policy of societal or institutional monolingualism (in French). It also reveals the ideological faultlines of such a policy, and how both francophone Canada as a whole and the Ecole Champlain in particular were forced to adapt to the new global economy of services and communication. But first of all we provide some general information about the language situation in Canada.
