Quebec has most aboriginal language speakers
22% increase in past decade
OTTAWA — About one-fifth of Canadians who count an aboriginal language as their mother tongue live in Quebec, according to 2011 census data.
The province counted more than 44,000 people with an aboriginal language as their first language in 2011, a 22 per cent increase over 2001 data. Since that year, Quebec overtook Manitoba as the province with the highest number of First Nations people who claim an aboriginal language as their mother tongue.
Manitoba and Saskatchewan trail Quebec closely, with 37,770 and 34,055 mother-tongue aboriginal speakers respectively.
Census figures show 213,500 Canadians are native speakers of an aboriginal language — virtually unchanged since 2006 but a nine per cent increase since 2001. The statistical jump coincides with a 20 per cent rise in the population of native people in Canada between 2001 and 2006.
There were about 1.17 million aboriginal people in Canada, according to 2006 census numbers. The 2011 numbers were not available.
“I think we’re seeing a concerted effort to preserve a language that was on the verge of extinction just a few decades ago,” said Joe Delaronde, a former council chief in the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake. “Children are learning (Mohawk) in classrooms, adults are learning it in immersion programs, many of them are taking it home and passing it on.”
The surge in the use of Mohawk in the Montrealarea reserve isn’t reflected in the census data, which only counted mother tongues and languages spoken most often at home. But Delaronde says the changes he sees in his community will show in the long run.
Mohawk is one of the least popular mother tongues among First Nations communities in Canada, as only about 545 people count it as their first language. Despite its modest presence, Mohawk is used on street signs, community newsletters and in large sections of Kahnawake’s community-run newspaper.
The largest aboriginal language family in Canada is Algonquian, with 144,015 people claiming a dialect as their mother tongue. Cree and Ojibwa are the two most popular branches of the linguistic family.
“The (Algonquian) language is at the very heart of our identity as a people,” Wemotaci Grand Chief David Boivin told Postmedia News in a September interview. “It has a richness to it, it connects us to nature and to our traditions.”
Like most of the communities that speak an Algonquian dialect, Wemotaci lies deep within Canada’s wilderness. The northern Quebec territory is only access- ible by a long trudge down a logging road or up the St. Maurice River.
Although unemployment and poverty remain problematic in the community of about 1,300, an overwhelming majority of the village speaks Algonquian as a first language, and traditional practices like hunting and fishing remain common on the reserve.
“There’s poverty, yes, but there’s a kind of wealth you retain when you can hold onto your identity,” Boivin said.
There’s limited data to track the number of people learning a native dialect as their second language. But 2011 figures show that more than 38,000 Canadians adopted an aboriginal language and began using it at home.
“We find a lot of these (38,000) Canadians are younger, which suggests that they’re learning the language in school and taking it home,” said Kathy Connors, a representative for Statistics Canada.
About 60 aboriginal languages from 12 linguistic families are spoken in Canada.