ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex interplay between individual and societal multilingualism. The example of societal multilingualism presented in the chapter is Canada. The chapter focuses on 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 French-medium school, the Ecole Champlain, in the anglophone province of Ontario. It provides 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). The chapter reviews the ideological faultlines of societal policy of monolingualism, 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. It also provides some general information about the language situation in Canada.
