From: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Date published: 3/19/2025 11:00:00 AM | Date modified: 3/19/2025 11:00:00 AM
Nicole Rosen, University of Manitoba linguistics professor.
Photo: University of Manitoba
Canada is a multicultural country whose bilingual status recognizes two official language communities, one francophone and the other anglophone. Yet, the two pan-Canadian communities are both highly diverse, each containing hundreds of thousands of people whose mother tongue is neither French nor English.
“Canada can hardly claim to be a multicultural country if it only recognizes bilingualism. In reality, language and culture are inseparable, and multilingualism should be part of multiculturalism,” suggests Nicole Rosen, Canada Research Chair in Language Interactions at the University of Manitoba.
Rosen studies Canada’s vast linguistic diversity and works with organizations such as the Conseil jeunesse provincial (provincial youth council) of Manitoba and the BC Métis Federation in British Columbia to address the language rights of groups such as recent immigrants and First Nations, Métis and Inuit children.
As head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Manitoba, she also focuses on Manitoba’s diverse population to spark innovation in the study of past and present interactions among official; heritage; and First Nations, Métis and Inuit languages.
Nicole Rosen examines sociolinguistic interviews with a student.
The Prairies have witnessed the arrival of French, German, Ukrainian and Mennonite settlers, who have each left their mark on the French spoken in the region, as have the languages of the First Nations. More than 112,000 people, representing about 9% of the Manitoban population, speak French. But the French spoken on the Prairies is unique. A language specific to this area, called “Michif”, was even created in the Red River Valley stemming from language contact between cultures. Michif, a blend of French, Plains Cree, Ojibwe and English, is now an endangered Métis language.
“During my master’s in French linguistics at the University of Toronto, we spoke about the ‘mixed languages’ of the world, and Michif was always cited as an example. I didn’t even know the language existed, despite being from Manitoba,” says Rosen.
That was the spark that prompted her to return to Manitoba and explore how group identity is expressed through language.
“What interests me most is understanding the interactions between people and languages that are in close proximity to each other,” she says. “My research aims to discover what language tells us about the interactions between people, but also how language changes as a result of these interactions. This relationship goes both ways.”
For example, one group adopting an expression common in another could indicate these two groups have interacted and communicated with each other, even while each group’s accent remains distinct.
“It’s not just the vocabulary. It’s also a question of pronunciation, what we call ‘sociophonetics.’ These are very subtle differences, but they can be heard, for example, the way we pronounce the consonantsp,t,k, with or without aspiration. Each group has its own way of producing these sounds,” says Rosen.
Among Manitoba’s Francophones, we find different accents depending on whether the speaker comes from Winnipeg, St. Boniface, Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes or elsewhere. Over time, these accents have become more distinctive, thanks to the arrival of immigrants from the international French-speaking community. Today, all these accents generally coexist harmoniously.
By way of illustration, Rosen speaks of certain widely distributed bird species that borrow sounds from surrounding birds, singing differently depending on their location, like a dialect.
“We never say that birds sing badly or that they should express themselves differently. It should be the same for the diversity of accents. It is so lovely to hear these differences that reflect the mosaic of people,” she concludes.
To find out more about Nicole Rosen’s work on language interactions in the Canadian Prairies and the details of sociophonetic variation in speech, visit her University of Manitoba webpage.
