Multilingualism In A Speech Community

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Introduction Nowadays, there are a great deal of immigrants all around the globe due to the rapid globalization. According to an article from 24/7 Wall St, the top three countries which have the most immigrants are Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Especially in Canada, over 20 percent are immigrants. When immigrants come to a country, they form a small society called a speech community to maintain their language within the dominant language society. According to AboutEducation, the definition of a speech community is a sociolinguistic term for people who use the same variety of a language and share specific rules for speaking and interpreting speech. Although forming a speech community seems like a positive action, it sometime may…show more content…
Each existent languages possesses an identity of its own. A quote by Charlemagne says, “to have another language is to possess another soul.” This quote shows that learning a language will develop an identity. For example, Japanese people possess a Japanese identity by being able to speak Japanese. French people have a French identity by speaking French. Even though this language identity matter is a unique feature of language by itself, there is another distinctive feature commonly known as multilingualism. Multilingualism is related in the case of immigration, colonization, and variations of conquest throughout history. This ability to be able to speak multiple languages are valued nowadays, especially being able to speak English as a worldwide language is useful in many ways such as business and education and so on. Although multilingualism is common in many parts of the world today, there was the…show more content…
Even in Vancouver, Japanese immigrants are currently well co-existant. Japanese immigrants have a longer history of Canada, and when looked into history, they were not always co-existant. As Japanese immigrants from Hawaii rapidly increased during the early 1900s, the white people in Vancouver began to worry that there were too many “Japs.” In 1907, a riot took place in Vancouver which was aimed at the Japanese immigrants. They were also discriminated during World War 2. Now, these people are accepted in the society but it took a long time for acceptance. In all speech communities, their intention is to hang on to their identity in a new environment. This is not a negative thing, even considering the example of exclusion of the Chinese mass speech community, but it always take time to the problem to neutralize and the immigrants to get
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