Supporting NA Native Languages

Need a reason to support ensuring that Native languages are not lost? Need a reason as to why they can be and are important?

Google "code talkers".

Saw the movie windtalkers a few years ago about the code talkers in WWII..

That movie just concentrated on the Navajo code talkers in the Japanese theater. There were more than just Navaho that were used, in both WWI and WWII.

Whose job is it to ensure these languages are not lost?

Historians perhaps?

I think that'd be a noble cause, no doubt.

I'd say whomever has an interest in them would be the ones to preserve their integrity.There's a lot of info concerning my Dad's language around and I am slowly learning it. It's tough, though, my brain isn't wired for languages. Also trying to learn my Mum's language. That's even nastier. lol

Nope, have since I was a kid.

Nope, and although I haven't always, I do now.

Desatsakda!

Ours. No pun intended.

They always mess things up.

Language and culture defines us. First Nation languages and cultures make Canada unique and preserving them is important. Whenever Canada presents itself to the world, we often use first nation symbols and ideas. For example:

Vancouver 2010 logo


Interest in first nation culture may be higher in Germany than Canada:

Everyone's. It's only a matter of respect to learn the local indigenous language. When in England, you learn English as the local indigenous language. Why should it be any different here.

My problem though is with access to quality self-instruction books in the local indigenous language, Algonquin. There are computer programmes for it, but I feel more comfortable with a paper book. Unfortunately, such a book for self-instruction doesn't exist for Algonquin. One man had recommended learning Ojibwe first because of similarities, but that's a bit of a round about way of learning it. It would be like having to learn Dutch and then switching to English. And even the Ojibwe book presented was not too impressive. It dealt mainly with basic conversation. Well, seeing that I don't have any local indigenous friend who knows these languages, it would make more sense in my case to learn the written language, not the spoken one, except for proper pronunciation of the words I read.

I was absolutely shocked at this. Even for Esperanto (which only started its existence in 1887), we have quality self-instruction books, modern dictionaries, publications at varying degress of difficulty, etc. etc. etc. How can we not even have a quality sefl-instruction book for Algonquin for those who want to learn the language but whose schedule prevent them from taking courses?

It's truly shameful how we've let the local indigenous population down so much that even those of us who want to learn their language can't owing to a lack of sufficient quality self-instruciton books!

Seeing what we'd done to the local indigenous population, it would seem that making their language accessible to us via such publicaitons would eb the least we could do fot those of us who are willing to learn the language.