According to the latest Statistics Canada census (2021), the country’s indigenous languages have just over 243,000 speakers, and this number continues to decrease over the years. But behind this worrying portrait, linguists are working to bring these “dormant” languages to life.
An analysis of linguistic data from the last census carried out by The duty shows that the number of native speakers of indigenous languages in the country fell by almost 24% between 2016 and 2021. The proportion of people who can hold a conversation in one of these approximately 70 languages fell by around 8%.
The reason for this decline is directly linked to the language spoken at home, explains Sigwan Thivierge, linguist and assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal. Even if the elders of a community speak the language and try to pass it on to their children and grandchildren, they often become passive bilinguals due to lack of exposure to the language at school and at home.
The more the years pass during childhood, “the more this critical exposure diminishes,” explains the professor. “So even if children have started to learn their language, if they can’t speak it with their grandparents, for example, they won’t be able to move from being a passive listener to a speaker. »
Marie-Odile Junker, linguist and professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, emphasizes that the age of the speakers is a key element in language transmission. “A language is in danger if it is no longer transmitted to children. You can have a language where there aren’t many speakers, but if everyone talks to the children and the children speak the language, it’s not threatened. »
Conversely, even if a language has many speakers, if they are all at an advanced age, “that’s a problem.”
“Talking to our children”
How can we remedy this loss of young speakers of these ancestral languages? “The easy answer is that we have to talk to our children,” summarizes Mme Thivierge. The language must be spoken everywhere, all the time, so that we do not lose the knowledge we always have. » Learning as an adult is an option, certainly, but it is much more difficult than in early childhood, underlines the professor.
“I am ready to say that all communities [au pays], regardless of the nation, do something to preserve their language,” she emphasizes. A large part of this work also involves education.
Marie-Odile Junker has worked for more than 20 years with Algonquin communities across the country to produce grammatical resources and online dictionaries, among other things, as well as an Algonquin linguistic atlas listing the languages and dialects of this linguistic group.
“It’s important for people that their language lives on modern technological and communication means,” she explains. These are linguistic resources where the language is documented, and at the same time, they will serve as a basis for the development of educational tools. »
Bringing languages “home”
For Sigwan Thivierge, there is still work to be done in order to make certain linguistic resources accessible in Indigenous communities across the country. This is the heart of his work as a linguist, which focuses, among other things, on Anishinaabemowin in his native nation of Long Point, in Abitibi-Témiscamingue.
“I want to bring the language home,” she illustrates. Because it seems like our languages are no longer ours when studied in a theoretical context. »
Understanding language within communities differs greatly from the complex jargon of grammars and academic studies. “Language cannot be dissociated from its speaker, just as a person cannot be dissociated from his land. The land is us, it’s the culture, it’s everything. It’s the same with language. »
In a scholarly environment, it is the opposite: a language is governed by rules completely independent of who speaks it. This work remains essential, because it allows the survival of a language beyond oral preservation by its speakers.
Bridging this gap, however, is not impossible. Sigwan Thivierge raises the example of the Miami nation, which lives south of the Great Lakes, in the United States. Although the last speakers of Miami-Illinois died out in the 1960s, the efforts of Daryl Baldwin, a national linguist, and his colleague David Costa, beginning in the 1990s, helped revive research on the language. , both having hope that it will once again be taught within the nation.
This example, according to her, calms the concern that the country’s indigenous languages could become extinct in the coming years. “Someone can always go and teach from a book, from a grammar book. There is always hope. » She uses the words of David Costa to describe the situation: “Our languages are not dead. They’re just asleep. »