The use of Spanish in the linguistic landscape of a small Canadian town

Abstract

In Canada the presence of one, other, or both of the official languages of the country implies the demographic presence of a particular ethnolinguistic group, either Anglophones or Francophones, in a specific region. However, Canada is also a multicultural country with a varied ethnolinguistic population where the presence or absence of a non-official language seems to reflect the strength or weakness of an ethnolinguistic group within the society (Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Huebner, 2006). With an ethnographic and sociolinguistics approach, this study shows that in Leamington, Ontario, there is a multilingual landscape and that the use of Spanish in different, but specific, domains manifests the existence of subjective ethnolinguistic vitality of a group, Mexican agricultural temporary workers, that has been institutionally discriminated and perceived as inexistent and socially invisible.