10.0 Conclusions

Reflect on language in your profession/social work

Despite positive examples of language shift reversal from elsewhere in the world, including Maori, Hawaiian, and Hebrew, language shift in Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States has proven difficult to resist or reverse. This is partly due to the high degree of linguistic diversity on the North American Continent, as opposed to the context of Maori and Hawaiian, the two being the only Indigenous languages in New Zealand and Hawaii respectively (Ahlers 2006:59). Further, the patterns of language shift and language loss in North America have not been uniform (Mithun 1998), requiring diverse, locally specific responses. British Columbia alone is home to over 30 Indigenous languages and as many as 60 dialects. Eight distinct languages with a multiplicity of dialects are present in the Yukon Territory. Such diversity, together with the relatively small size of most language communities, poses limitations on human and financial resources, as well as limitations to general institutional support in terms of language-specific teacher training and language material development, for example. Nunavut is somewhat of a unique case in North America, where the Inuit language is the one major Indigenous language in the territory spoken by large population, however, the language has multitude of dialects and their individual vitality is uneven. Cases such as Myamia (Leonard 2007) and Nsyilxcn (Johnson 2012) language efforts suggest that significant language revitalization is possible, even for a small language community. Additionally, Hinton’s (2013) edited volume of essays, detailing a range of individual and family efforts from diverse contexts in many parts of the world, challenges us to think about what it means for language revitalization to be successful and who gets to make that judgment For more discussion, watch Hinton’s 2015 UBC lecture titled What Counts as a “Success” in Language Revitalization.