Community Morphology
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When the problem of evaluating the vitality of OLMCs is raised, the first practical question that comes to mind, for both the observers and the players, is: What community are we talking about? The term community covers a range of meanings. The Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages normally uses the word "community" for official language minority communities and the word "collectivity" for official language majority communities. For many people, a community is a neighbourhood, a village, a town or a region where the official language minority is concentrated, whereas others see it as a network of institutions, organizations or individuals that share a feeling of belonging to one of the official language minorities.
The social sciences are themselves struggling with the empirical delimitation of a community but, generally speaking, they recognize a community as a grouping of individuals who have ongoing interrelationships (objective component) and who share an interest and a sense of belonging (subjective component). Interrelationships constitute the key component of a community, whether we are talking about a territorial community that shares a geographical or administrative space, or whether a sectoral or collective community of interest with real or virtual relationships. Governments are also striving to formulate a working definition of what constitutes the communities for which they are required to provide support or services. The issues involved in this definition are not only theoretical, but also political.
At the time the 1988 Official Languages Act was promulgated, attentive observers and analysts were reporting the erosion of the communities (Caldwell and Waddell, 1982; Thériault, 1989), even though the community reference was maintained and promoted as the only path to salvation (Bernard, 1988), at the same time as the potential of other forms of spaces and networks–cultural and linguistic–was being envisaged (Thériault, 1989).
In the context of a reflection on the vitality of OLMCs, it is accordingly fruitful to distinguish between the various meanings given to the concept of community, both in the literature and in the experience of the players involved. We focus on the concepts of territory and interest for the purpose of this discussion of the form of communities, but these concepts must not be regarded as mutually exclusive. As seen below, both realities co-exist, each with its own challenges.
