The Cultural Integration of Adult Immigrants in Canada: The Role of Language Ability

Abstract

This manuscript is dedicated to researching the link between language acquisition and cultural integration. As this has overtime become a glaring gap in multiple federal integration policy instruments, we carried out both theoretical reviews as well as fieldwork to answer this question. In so far as fieldwork goes, we recruited two contrasting participants twenty-two and thirty-five years old respectively, male and female, from different cultural groups but both sharing the overall goal of integration in Canada and enrolled in the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program. We carried out semi-structured interviews by way of a theory-based protocol and subsequently processed the data via thematic analysis techniques to arrive at our results. Empirically speaking, we synthesized our participants’ lived experiences and perceptions and found that language plays four distinct roles related to culture and cultural integration. First, it is a tool with which to transmit cultural information directly (the referential function). Second, it is the carrier of a second wave of pragmatic (e.g. body language, prosody) from which cultural norms and conventions can be inferred. Third, language is a tool for group differentiation on the basis of which prototypical members (i.e. native-speakers both in the source and destination culture) at times ostracize learners based on linguistic markers. Lastly, we find that it is precisely the experience of loss of membership, disembeddedness, and lack of belonging in previous and future speech groups which then drives newcomers to cultural integration patterns which are less than additive in nature such as intersection and compartmentalization.