The many indigenous languages of North America have been under pressure for centuries.
Many are extinct, and many still-living languages are in decline.
One language specialist from Inuvik in Canada’s Northwestern Territories, Lillian Elias, has been working for many years as a translator for the legislative assembly, but she is 82 years old now, and nobody is stepping in to replace her. Just over 400 people speak her language, Inuvialuktun, and as more than half are over fifty, it’s clear that this is yet another sad story of an indigenous language steadily dying out.
The reasons why languages die out are many and complex, with roots in colonial history, social change, and changes to the education system. Government decisions about how experts in minority languages are hired and paid can have an impact too. In Canada, professionals working with indigenous languages are freelancers, while their counterparts providing interpretation and translation services in French (one of Canada’s official languages) are government employees, with better employment and pension rights. It all contributes to an environment that, wilfully or otherwise, treats indigenous languages differently.
It’s a complicated situation, obviously, as many indigenous languages are spoken by relatively few people, who don’t need translation and interpretation often enough to keep someone employed full-time. But there’s more at stake than linguistic human rights, as important as those are. As languages die, so does access to history, culture and traditions that date back through the generations, providing everyone with a fuller, deeper and more nuanced understanding of both the past and the present.
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