This Friday, the Université du Québec à Montreal (UQAM) will host linguists from across North America who will explore how indigenous languages work, how we record them, and how we might be able to preserve them.
Richard Compton, a linguistics professor at UQAM, told the Montreal Gazette, “To ask a linguist what it might mean for (Canada) to lose an indigenous language, that’s like asking a biologist what it might mean for the rain forest to disappear.”
Professor Compton is working on a dictionary that compiles about 8,000 words in Kangiryuarmiut, a language used by indigenous people in Canada’s remote northwest.
In 2011, PhD student Janine Metallic partnered with McGill University’s linguistics department for a project on the Mi’kmaq language. She learned to speak the language from her parents on the Gaspé Peninsula. She said, “Something magical happens when she hears the Mi’kmaq language spoken.”
Read more about this story in the Montreal Gazette article.
