Acculturation, Vitality, and Bilingual Healthcare
This chapter provides a conceptual framework for examining the delivery of bilingual healthcare for linguistic minorities in Canada’s Bilingual Belt. First, the chapter provides an overview of the ethnolinguistic vitality framework accounting for the sociostructural factors affecting the strength of minority and majority language communities within multilingual countries. Second, the interactive acculturation model (IAM) helps account for relations between high- and low-vitality group speakers whose intercultural relations may be harmonious, problematic, or conflictual. Third, the chapter provides a case study of a pluralist setting that offers three distinct bilingual healthcare systems for French and English communities in Canada’s Bilingual Belt. While the delivery of bilingual healthcare is cost neutral relative to unilingual healthcare systems, at issue is whether minority language patients achieve better health outcomes when they are cared for in their own language than in the language of the dominant majority.