In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European settlers
from diverse backgrounds transformed Ontario. By 1881, German speakers
made up almost ten per cent of the province's population and the German
language was spoken in businesses, public schools, churches, and homes.
German speakers in Ontario - children, parents, teachers, and religious
groups - used their everyday practices and community institutions to
claim a space for bilingualism and religious diversity within Canadian
society. In The Boundaries of Ethnicity Benjamin Bryce considers what it
meant to be German in Ontario between 1880 and 1930. He explores how the
children of immigrants acquired and negotiated the German language and
how religious communities relied on language to reinforce social
networks. For the Germans who make up the core of this study, the
distinction between insiders and outsiders was often unclear. Boundaries
were crossed as often as they were respected. German ethnicity in this
period was fluid, and increasingly interventionist government policies
and the dynamics of generational change also shaped the boundaries of
ethnicity.German speakers, together with immigrants from other countries
and Canadians of different ethnic backgrounds, created a framework that
defined relationships between the state, the public sphere, ethnic
spaces, family, and religion in Canada that would persist through the
twentieth century. The Boundaries of Ethnicity uncovers some of the
origins of Canadian multiculturalism and government attempts to manage
this diversity.
