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The French language has traditionally been understood as a key symbol of Quebec identity; however, with rapidly changing demographics, new ways of identifying with Quebec have begun to emerge. Drawing on a bilingual corpus of English and French briefs submitted to the Bouchard Taylor Commission on religious and cultural accommodation, this corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) investigates the extent to which language plays a continuing role as both a symbol and medium in the construction of nationhood and belonging in Quebec popular discourse. Language was found to remain both a central concern and a demarcating line within and between English, French, and minority language speakers’ discourses. This study breaks new ground by adapting the CADS methodology to a bilingual corpus. We discuss the advantages of using CADS in two languages and point to remaining challenges such as keyness and corpus comparability.

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This article examines the appropriation of academic biliteracy by three French-speaking students at an English-medium university in the Canadian province of Québec. Drawing on Hornberger's continua model of biliteracy, Bourdieu's critical social theory, and philosophical hermeneutics, the author conceptualizes individual biliterate development as a subjective and intersubjective evaluative response to social contexts of possibilities for biliteracy. Case study data were collected during 2 ½ years and included autobiographical and text-based interviews, inventories and analyses of academic writing in English and French, classroom-based observations, field notes, and documentation of the legal, historical, institutional, and demographic contexts. Analyses of the participants' negotiations and trajectories of bilingual academic writing development reveal the challenges and resources of bilingual writers to uphold their commitment to academic biliteracy within English-dominant institutional and disciplinary contexts.Implications for the advancement of multilingual academic literacies are drawn.