Reviving the Mohawk language with an immersion scheme

Is it possible to learn a language that’s in danger of dying out?

Just ask Greg Horn, a Mohawk journalist in his 20s, who comes from Kahnawake, the Mohawk community near Montreal.

Horn says he didn’t speak much Mohawk before spending nine months in an immersion course.

But, not long ago, after finishing the language course, he was able to write his first article in Mohawk for the Eastern Door, Kahnawake’s weekly newspaper.

Kahnawake’s new focus on the teaching of Mohawk began in 1998, when Mohawk elders put out a declaration calling for the language’s preservation.

Since then, courses for adults have led to new speakers like Horn. The community has also set up “language nests” for preschool children who now learn Mohawk in a home-like setting.

In Kahnawake, not some, but all of the community’s 900 municipal workers must take lessons in Mohawk. Starting in September, they’ll study Mohawk using interactive Rosetta Stone software purchased from a U.S. company.

By 2020, Kahnawake wants nine in 10 of its employees to be fluent in the language, now spoken by only one in eight residents of this Mohawk community of 8,000. The timetable is to see 30 per cent of the speakers fluent in five years, 60 per cent in 10 years and 90 per cent in 15 years.

Kahnawake has been lucky to get government money, private donations and contributions from its investments to fund this Mohawk-relearning campaign. The community also made choices to spend this money on reviving the Mohawk language.

How these kinds of efforts could work to bolster Inuktitut is the subject of “Preserving our language and our knowledge,” the latest Etudes Inuit-Inuit Studies Journal, which looks at “the steam-roller effect of Western thinking and state-supported European majority languages,” and how Inuktitut can survive.

Reversing the shift away from Inuit culture and language can be done, say contributors to this journal, who spoke at a 2004 conference called “Reversing Language and Knowledge Shift in the North?”.

Longtime Inuktitut language teacher Mick Mallon, writing about the former “Eskimo Language School and his other courses to teach Inuktitut, says a combination of grammar and exposure to Inuit culture achieved some success, particularly among young Inuit wanting to improve their Inuktitut.

“This may be the most vital contribution we have made to reserving the shift,” Mallon says. That’s because most bureaucrats and southerners don’t remain in the North long enough to really become fluent in Inuktitut or pass on the language, but Inuit who relearn Inuktitut do.

The journal looks at Labrador, where almost no children speak their dialect of Inuktitut, as a first language any longer; most of the fluent speakers are over 35; and none are under 10. Even in Nain, with its greater number of Inuttitut speakers, no teenagers are fluent.

Promoting cultural activities helps a language survive, research suggests. In Labrador, “Speakoffs,” where speakers display their abilities in front of the public, have also been successful ways to promote language use.

Meanwhile, only limited language immersion is available in Nain and Hopedale, and language nests for toddlers or “innuaggualuit” have been hard to maintain because the staff must be certified, but most of the certified workers are too young to speak Inuttitut.

Only one in ten Labradormiut ever uses Inuttitut socially or at home: “what happens over the next 10 years will determine whether or not Labrador will be a region where Inuttitut continues to live or is instead an area where the language is a cultural memory to be found only in books, video, audiotapes, etc.”

For more information on obtaining the Etudes Inuit-Inuit Studies journal go to: http://www.fss.ulaval.ca/etudes-inuit-studies.