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The Media in Canada

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Language and Canadian Media

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Abstract

This chapter delves into the Canadian context by providing a historical overview of language in Canada and tracing Canadian media from its more traditional forms (e.g. newspapers, public broadcaster) to new and social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter). It then turns to previous research that has been undertaken on Canadian media, which has demonstrated the extent to which English and French Canadian media diverge and their contribution towards the construction of the “two solitudes” (MacLennan, Two solitudes. Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1945). The chapter also discusses the lack of research on language ideologies in Canada and the lack of comparative English-French media research, which are both the central focus of the later chapters of this book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Only newspapers from different provinces (or, in the cases where regions consisted of a single province, cities) were considered and no free newspapers were included in the sample. Some newspaper data, such as the Journal de Montréal and the Journal de Québec, were unavailable.

  2. 2.

    One exception to this general trend is a large study on representations of climate change in English and French Canadian news media, which has used both quantitative and qualitative methods, including discourse analysis, on a large corpus of data (see DiFrancesco and Young 2010; Young and Dugas 2011, 2012).

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  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Rachelle Vessey

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Vessey, R. (2016). The Media in Canada. In: Language and Canadian Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53001-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53001-1_2

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