The Language of the Skies chronicles one of the most bitter crises in French-English relations in Canada: the bilingual air traffic control conflict which arose in the mid-1970s when francophone controllers and pilots attempted to use French, as well as English, in Québec aviation.

Through extensive interviews with the key participants, Professor Borins reveals the interplay of organizational ideologies and interests and leaders' personalities that characterized the conflict. He traces its evolution from the early formation of a francophone pressure group, through the airline pilots' strike in June 1976 in support of the controllers, to the agreement between the pilots' and controllers' unions and the Minister of Transport which the French Canadians saw as a humiliating defeat, and to the eventual acknowledgement by the Clark government in August 1979 that bilingual air traffic control was safe.

Borins discusses the implications of these events for public policy and French-English relations and concludes that the federal government's ability in this case to meet francophone demands quite rapidly is cause for optimism about the ability of the federal state to accommodate francophone aspirations.