Sport volunteerism in Canada: Do linguistic groups count? International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Abstract Given the importance of volunteerism to Canadian sport, and the need for research to understand the characteristics of sport volunteerism, a pilot study was carried out to explore the experiences of volunteers in sport. The study focused on two different sport associations (one individ-ual sport and one team sport) in two majority linguistic localities (one predominantly francophone in Québec and one predominantly anglophone in Ontario). Language is a key element of community membership, and this article pays specific attention to the relationship between language and sport volunteerism in Canada. The results indicate that there are some different patterns of sport volunteer-ing between the two different (official) linguistic communities, and suggest that the experiences of Canadian sport volunteers in relation to linguistic community membership have implications for the recruitment, training, and retention of volunteers in sport, and warrant further research. Key words • language • linguistic communities • sport volunteerism Despite growing research interest in volunteerism and the fact that 18 percent of total volunteerism in Canada is devoted to sport (Doherty, 2005), we know little about community sport volunteerism. In part, this is a result of statistics not dis-tinguishing sport as an area of volunteering. For example, in Statistics Canada’