Toronto a hotbed for endangered languages
Linguist documents rare tongues that may be preserved better here than in their homeland
Paolo Frasca’s rare Italian dialect “fossilized” in Toronto and found its own community here.
“That is why I speak the dialect probably better than the people in my generation back home in Italy,” said Frasca, 24. “It’s because I moved here when I was13 years old.”
He speaks a language particular to a small town of about 3,000 people in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. This tongue is closer to Latin than typical Italian because of the region’s late Romanization.
Back home, younger generations such as his don’t speak Santonofrese — named after the town of Sant’Onofrio — because it is seen as “lowbrow.”
He says that thanks to Toronto’s large Italian community, there may be several endangered languages and dialects like his preserved in the city as people continue to speak them with their families.
That’s not always the case, though. Anastasia Riehl, who started the Endangered Languages Alliance Toronto, has been documenting which of the world’s dying languages are spoken in Toronto, including Frasca’s. Some are spoken by just one or two people in the city or even in the world. Without a community to share it, those people stop speaking their language and absorb the regional language instead.
Riehl began the Alliance in Toronto after her Cornell University grad school colleague, David Kaufman, launched one in New York. After years of documenting languages overseas, she discovered the last fluent speaker of a dying Latvian language, Livonian, lived outside Toronto. The woman, Grizelda Kristina, was 101 and ailing.
“That’s when I was like, ‘OK, let’s just say we’re going to do this,’ ” she said of the day in 2011 when she hopped on a flight to Toronto from Argentina to interview the woman, who died two years later.
Since then, she’s interviewed more than a dozen speakers of eight endangered languages from around the world. She’s working on a short doc- umentary detailing the stories of three speakers. Riehl has taken time off from her role running the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University to devote more time to the project.
Toronto’s position as one of the most diverse cities in the world — more than 30 per cent of its residents speak a language other than English or French — makes it an “as good if not better” place to document endangered languages.
The city’s website pegs the number of languages and dialects spoken in the city at more than 140, but Riehl estimates there are “dozens” absent from census figures. Any language becomes endangered, according to the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), when its speakers cease to use it and when it is no longer passed onto the next generation.
“The global context we’re in has definitely impacted (language loss) because people have all these pressures to speak a more dominant language,” Riehl said. The phenomenon doesn’t appear only in English-speaking countries. “It’s a sad way to think about it, but it’s one of the few things (immigrants) bring with them.”
She says the best way to preserve a language is for children to speak it and use it. But the shyness younger immigrant generations, like Frasca’s, experience in speaking their language contrasts with the shame indigenous peoples of North America were forced to bear for years under colonization, said David Kaufman, founder of the Endangered Languages Alliance in New York and Riehl’s former Cornell colleague.
“The tragedy in New York, I would say, is that you can find almost every language under the sun except the indigenous language of New York itself, which is Lenape,” an Algonquin language, he said. The only place the language is now spoken and taught is in Ontario.
Riehl said documentation of indigenous languages is being done by grassroots initiatives.
Bonnie Jane Maracle, who helps run programs that teach the Mohawk language in the Tyendinaga First Nation, believes that what separates the endangered languages of indigenous communities from the rest is nationhood. “They have a home and a land and a nation to go back to. This is our home, but where do we return to, to re-learn our language?”