SUBTRACTIVE BILINGUALISM - THE CASE OF FRANCO-AMERICANS IN MAINES ST-JOHN VALLEY

The present study is part of an ongoing project which analyses the eff ects of ethnolinguistic vitality on the bilingual development of anglo phones and francophones in Canada and the United States. The study, ca rried out in two school districts of the St John Valley in. the state of Maine in the Unites States, compares three subgroups of francophone s and anglophobes on measures of the strength of their network of ling uistic contacts in French and English, their communicative and cogniti ve-academic linguistic proficiency in these languages, their vitality beliefs concerning the francophone and anglophone communities, the str ength of their ethnolinguistic identities and their degree of use of F rench and English in various social domains. The results, which are in terpreted within the framework of a macroscopic model of the determina nts of additive and subtractive bilingualism, are very conclusive in s howing that bilingualism for these Franco-American students is strongl y subtractive. The assimilation process observed in this study is attr ibuted to the very low degree of schooling in the mother tongue in par ticular, and to the generally low level of ethnolinguistic vitality of the francophone community in spite of their strong demographic presen ce.