Linguapax
Lapsing languages offer different view of world
Alban Michael is the only person alive who speaks the Nuchatlaht language.
By Jack Knox, Times Colonist April 30, 2011
Back when he was gillnetting salmon around Nootka Sound, Alban Michael had a handy way to stop the whole world from listening in when he radioed another boat.
"When I wanted to keep a secret, I spoke my language."
The 84-year-old has little opportunity to use that language anymore, though. He is, in fact, the very last person on Earth to speak Nuchatlaht.
Nuchatlaht.
I wrote about Alban a few years ago, when he personified the race to save -or at least record -the quickly vanishing native languages of Vancouver Island.
Thought of him the other day after reading that the last two speakers of the endangered Ayapaneco language of Mexico have had a spat and don't talk to each other. Couldn't decide if I should pretend to ignore the black humour in that, but Alban chuckled about it Friday when I phoned to see how he was doing.
He's still where we left him, way up in the tiny native settlement of Oclucje -pronounced OO-cloo-gee -a dozen kilometres down a dodgy logging road from Zeballos on northern Vancouver Island. He can still stare down Espinosa Inlet to Nootka Island, where he learned Nuchatlaht from his mother. It was all they spoke, as she never went to school, never had her own language scrubbed out of her and replaced by English.
It was six years ago this month that Alban's parents came to him in a dream while he was hospitalized with pneumonia. They spoke Nuchatlaht.
Alban's dreams are the only place where he can still hear Nuchatlaht, though he still gets to speak it a bit. He has a friend from the nearby Mowachaht band whose dialect is close enough to be understood. "I speak my language to him when I see him," he says.
"And I understand them in Ahousaht." But that's about it.
Alban's story is indicative of what is going on around the world, indigenous languages blinking out one by one. A study released last year by the First Peoples' Heritage, Language and Culture Council, based in Brentwood Bay, was sobering. Maybe eight languages have disappeared in B.C. Al of the remaining 32 are considered endangered or nearly extinct. About half of the people who still speak fluently are seniors. Only two per cent are under age
The roughly 30,000 aboriginal people of Vancouver Island mostly came from two linguistic families, Wakashan and Salishan, further divided into six languages (there is argument over that number, since it's not always clear where a dialect ends and a language begins).
Some overlap in the manner of Swedish and Norwegian, while some have been described as different as Russian and Congolese.
Only a few hundred of those 30,000 natives still speak the old languages fluently. The First Peoples' Council gave this snapshot:
- A total of 115 people are fluent in the dozen dialects (including Alban's Nuchatlaht) of Nuu-chah-nulth on the north and west Island.
- Just a dozen speakers of Ditidaht (also known as Nitinat) remain.
- Kwak'wala, the language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, who live along the inner coast and islands north of the Comox Valley, has 148 fluent speakers.
The Salishan languages are found from Sooke, through Victoria and Duncan and up to the Comox Valley: ? Thirty remain fluent in Comox-Sliammon.
- 278 are comfortable in the dialects of Hul'q'umi'num', found from Cowichan Bay to Nanoose.
- About 60 speak the Sencoten language of the Saanich Peninsula. The associated tongues of T'souke, Lekwungen, Semiahmoo, which were spoken from Sooke through Victoria are listed as "sleeping."
A couple of Malahat people are considered semi-fluent in Malchosen, the last fluent speaker having recently died.
"All it takes is one bad winter and you can lose up to 20 elders in one community," Tracey Herbert, executive director of the First Peoples Council, said Friday.
But Herbert is anxious to dispel the idea that aboriginal languages on Vancouver Island are a lost cause.
Much is being done not only to record the old tongues, but to create new speakers.
Proponents are buoyed by the success of immersion programs in which a fluent speaker is teamed with an apprentice; the approach has better results than the typical classroom model where a student ducks into the language for a few hours a week. To learn more, go to fphlcc.ca.
A basic question remains: Why should anyone care?
Because, proponents reply, language is the key to any culture, and every culture offers a different view of the world -a view, in Alban Michael's case, that only he can see.