‘The bilingual problem’. Nationalism and the language question in Canada (1791–1915)

Although English and French now have equal status in Canada, bilingualism and the language question have been the cause of heated debates in the history of the country, which, since the Treaty of Paris of 1763, has been characterised by the close coexistence of two profoundly different social groups, one francophone and Roman Catholic, the other anglophone and Protestant. While the foundations for present-day bilingualism were implicitly laid by the Constitutional Act of 1791 and reiterated in the Constitution Act of 1867, it was the English language, and the British model, that continued to be promoted as the official language of government. Moreover, during the late-19th and early-20th centuries a number of legislative acts across Canada restricted French-language education and the use of French itself outside of Quebec. As the popular media have always played an important role in representing, shaping and guiding public opinion, the paper investigates, following the methodologies of historical discourse analysis and historical sociopragmatics, the extent to which the language question surfaced in some of the most popular English language magazines published in Canada between the late-18th and early-20th centuries, and, specifically, how the relationship between language and nation was framed and discussed in such publications.