Official status for Canada's some 60 First Nations' indigenous languages should be "the ultimate goal" of the government, and meanwhile, major changes should be introduced to ensure the survival of the languages. This has been told by Perry Bellegarde, leader of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), to The Globe and Mail.

The AFN is a coordinating body of chiefs of Canada's 634 First Nations. It seeks to represent the interests of indigenous peoples with pre-colonial roots before the Canadian government. Bellgarde belongs to the Little Black Bear First Nation, which includes Cree and Assiniboine people.

The leader of the First Nations believes that "small steps to get there" should be done -only English and French enjoy full official status at the federal level-, and the first one of such should be allocating more financial resources to safeguard and promote knowledge of those languages.

Although a few of them -Cree, Ojibwa and Inuit- have a more or less viable future, half face extinction, according to Ethnologue. Many have fewer than 1,000 speakers -who in some cases are not fully competent in the language-, and a handful of languages with fewer than ten speakers also exist.

But not everything is lost yet, even for those languages with very few speakers. One example is British Columbia's Sencoten language. When it was about to vanish forever, a method of linguistic immersion was implemented for the first time in 2009. This has raised the number of people with some knowledge of the language up to more than 100. Some of the learners have achieved such a high level of command that they have now become Sencoten teachers.

Bellegard places great hope in such immersive programs. Schools, which were for decades the place where native populations were acculturated, could now be the means for indigenous language revival. The leader of the AFN says the federal government should allocate funds to extend those programs to First Nations settlements across Canada.

(Image: a trilingual Cree, English and French sign / photo by P199.)