Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have recently undertaken a social justice turn, focused on documenting the gendered, heterosexist and raciolinguistic ideologies that produce speakers as interactionally situated unequal subjects today. This turn, which coincides with the rise of intersectionality in the social sciences, has proven to be a challenge for the conceptualization of linguistic minoritization, at least in settler colonial minority settings such as Francophone Canada. Francophone Canadians were the first group to be recognized as an official minority, but only so as part of a colonial understanding of Canada as belonging to descendants of Great Britain and France, the two main colonial powers to settle Canada. Indeed, the Official Languages Act was adopted as a way to achieve “equality between Canada’s two founding nations”.

Today, Francophone leaders are torn between the raciolinguistic heritage of “founding nations” and the shared social justice goals of claims for equality as a minority group. In this paper, I study the affective stances of minority francophones in Canada, as they reimagine equality, and more specifically, linguistic equality as members of one of the two officially recognized languages in a state known for its multiculturalism and its recent policies seeking reconciliation with First Nations. I focus especially on affective stances of pride and indignation as ways to reproduce power or imagine new solidarities. Using ethnographic data from a longitudinal study of francophone Canada dating back from 1998 to 2023, I use affect theory to document the ordinariness of discourses of settler imperialism and the current innovations in terms of a reimagination of speakerhood as a space for voicing difference. I thus argue for a critical sociolinguistics that accounts for the role of solidarity in producing or challenging social inequalities.