LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
Windsor’s many tongues
“A man, a dog, a cow, a cat ... I knew a little bit of English.”
Jordan Simon laughs now at his grasp of the dominant local language when he, his wife and their two children first arrived in Windsor as refugees.
Only four local families spoke his native language of Nuer, one of them being his sister’s, which sponsored him in 2005. Simon was only seven when his family fled violence in Sudan for a sprawling United Nations refugee camp of 40,000 in Ethiopia in 1984, and that’s where he grew up.
Today, Simon works at a recycling business and is a part-time pastor at South Windsor’s Gethsemane Lutheran Church, which hosts Sunday services in Nuer for an estimated 151 Windsorites for whom it’s their mother tongue. Gethsemane has Bibles and hymn books written in Nuer.
At least 120 other languages can be heard on Windsor streets, many of them spoken by far smaller numbers in one of the nation’s most multicultural cities, according to the latest Statistics Canada report.
Ga, Wolof, Kabyle, Harari, Shona, Pangasinan, Konkani, Fulah and Bikol are among the rarer (10 people or less) of the mother tongues spoken by Windsor residents, according to the 2016 national census.
But the StatsCan survey doesn’t tell the full story or capture the complete number of languages spoken in Windsor. The Nuer that is sung on Sundays at Gethsemane Lutheran Church doesn’t even rate its own mention in the latest Statistics Canada report. A quick survey by the Windsor Star uncovered other languages spoken locally that also didn’t merit separate mention, mother tongues like Malinke, Jula and Kuku.
Moussa Keita, who arrived in Windsor with his family from another African refugee camp a year ago, was astonished when attending one of his first local workshops on adjusting to Canadian life, he bumped into another recently arrived refugee who spoke the same mother tongue, Jula. Both had fled religious persecution and war — conflict that saw Keita’s father, an Ivory Coast coffee and cocoa grower, killed and a brother and sister disappear 14 years ago.
Arriving in mid-November 2016, Keita said his family’s first big challenge, aside from learning English, was adjusting to a Canadian winter. There is no word for snow in Jula. “It was not easy,” Keita said through a French interpreter. By the spring, the family was advised that their first Windsor winter had been a relatively mild one. “What will we do this winter?” he laughs.
For more than three-quarters of Windsor’s residents — 167,960 (77 per cent) of a 2016 total city population of 217,188 — English is the “language spoken most often at home,” according to Statistics Canada. Arabic, with 7,745 people, Mandarin (2,740), Italian (1,990) and French (1,550) boast the nextlargest numbers among languages in that category.
The census numbers capturing what’s “spoken most at home” are reflective of when those groups first came to Windsor. Many Arabicspeaking families only just arrived from the Middle East in recent years, which is perhaps why 63 per cent (7,745) of the 12,340 Windsor residents whose mother tongue in 2016 was Arabic speak predominantly Arabic at home. Only 36 per cent (1,990) of the 5,495 of Windsorites who identify Italian as their mother tongue still speak predominantly Italian at home.
The change is generational. At home, Simon said he and his wife may speak Nuer, “but the kids answer in English.”
Including Canadian Aboriginal languages (the mother tongue of 45 Windsor residents) and two sign languages, the Star was able to tally 120 different languages being spoken in Windsor.
But in Simon’s home country of Sudan alone there are some 64 different languages spoken, only one of which, Dinka (with 50 residents), rates its own separate listing in the Statistics Canada report for Windsor. Nuer would be included within a Nilo-Saharan “not included elsewhere” grouping.
“Due to confidentiality reasons, the language groups cannot be broken down further,” Statistics Canada spokeswoman Laura Drope said in an email.
There are hundreds of languages spoken in Africa’s Niger-Congo region alone, and at least 14 of those can be heard on Windsor streets, dominated by Swahili with 195 residents and with Fula and Shona, at five Windsorites each, being among the local mother tongues with the fewest members.
There are “so many African languages” spoken in Windsor, said Jan Foy, an English-as-a-secondlanguage teacher and consultant with the Greater Essex County District School Board. Formerly a language assessor with the local Newcomer Reception Centre, she recalls one newly arrived family which “didn’t speak a word of English and spoke a language I’d never heard of.”
But Foy said the centre was able to track down “the one person in Windsor who spoke this language — Kuku.”
One of the challenges with assisting those who belong to very small language groups locally is preserving confidentiality and their privacy, for example when it comes to something as intimate and personal as a visit to the doctor’s office.
“If you have one interpreter from a community that is very small, everyone knows each other — going to the doctor is something very personal,” said Marcela Diaz, settlement and integration program manager with the Multicultural Council of Windsor and Essex County.
The multicultural council, tasked with helping integrate Windsor’s newcomers, works with more than 500 clients a month, said Diaz. The top five languages of those currently being helped: Arabic (primarily Syrian refugees), Nepalese (refugees arriving from refugee camps in Bhutan), Chaldean Neo-Aramaic (from Iraq), Spanish (from Latin America) and Swahili (from Congo).
Of those assisted by the centre, “a large number come from conflict areas,” said Diaz. The Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese) and Spanish newcomers tend to be economic immigrants, she added.
To the 2016 census question of “knowledge of” Canada’s two official languages, 190,215 Windsorites responded “English only,” 18,840 said English and French, 325 said French only, and 5,550 Windsorites said they had knowledge of neither English nor French.
Of the 55 Windsor residents who told last year’s census takers that their mother tongue was one of Canada’s Aboriginal languages, only 15 were identified as speaking one of the 57 languages specifically listed — Ojibway. The others were grouped together under CreeMontagnais (15), Eastern Algonquian (5), Inuit (5), Iroquoian (5) and “Aboriginal not otherwise specified” (10).
Five Windsorites each listed Estonian, Swedish, Welsh, Uzbek and Icelandic as their mother tongue. In 2016, nobody in Windsor could converse in Inuktitut or Norwegian.
Until his mother tongue creates its own word for winter, Moussa Keita said his family will simply use the Jula word for cold. But one of his first goals is to conquer Windsor’s main language.
“After English, I’d really love to be a truck driver,” he said through the French interpreter. “This is what I’m praying to God for.”