Abstract

During post WW II migration wave, Italians accounted for a large portion of immigrants and they settled extensively in Ontario and Quebec. Within Quebec, over 90 percent live on the Island of Montreal, and the Francophone municipality of Saint-Léonard has the highest concentration of Italians since 1971. Initially, assimilation was the expected outcome of immigrants' adaptation; however, since 1971, multiculturalism encourages the maintenance of ethnic culture and language, but loss of ethnic languages still occurs. The three-generation language shift model suggests that by the third generation, the dominant language will be this generation's mother tongue. However, the literature cites several factors as countering linguistic assimilation, such as residential concentration and intramarriage. Women have consistently shown higher retention rates than men, yet they have received little attention in the intergenerational process. In addition, research on the third generation is still recent and focuses at macro levels. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the role of women in the inter-generational process of ethnic language maintenance and to identify the forces at work, specifically within the home domain, that encourage the retention of the ethnic language. This study is based on data collected from a pilot survey that served to identify potential family triads and from semi-structured interviews of the family triads of which the grandmother resides in Saint-Léonard. The results show that intergenerational linguistic change varies by family as a result of the many domains in an individual's life and the particular characteristics of each family history since migration