National Strategy For Linguistic Security

Insecurity comes from an action, an intervention, a comment, a menacing context that hurts, intimidates, humiliates or frustrates someone about their language or the way they use it.

Linguistic insecurity isn’t just about accents. For many, language standards are at the heart of the problem.

Although linguistic insecurity is a phenomenon that is experienced and studied in many communities the world over, this strategy deals with the phenomenon in a very specific context.

It doesn’t claim to address the concerns of every language minority in Canada.

Its orientation, the challenges it describes, the strategies and suggested courses of action are all specific to Canada’s francophonie.

The literature review and consultations allowed us to identify four main sectoral areas from which we developed this strategy.

These areas became the four fields of intervention at the heart of this strategy: education, the workforce, culture and media and public policies.

A global objective accompanies the fields of intervention.

This approach allowed us to identify problems (challenges) for each field of intervention and the global objective, as well as strategies and courses of action seeking to improve the current situation in various regards.

One thing’s for sure: we’re not claiming that this strategy can eliminate or cure linguistic insecurity.

This strategy aims to reinforce la linguistic security, both on the collective and individual level and to consolidate favourable conditions for linguistic security.