Language Matters - the importance of aboriginal languages

The Fraser looking towards X'axlip in the winter

Same place but in the early fall

An old friend from my days of working with the Ts'kw'aylacw First Nation is staying with us for a couple of weeks while he is doing some course work for his Masters degree.   Bucky is involved with reviving the St'at'imc language and in talking with him I am reminded how vitally important the language is to the survival of the culture.

I love the land along the Fraser from Lytton through to near Williams Lake.  It is a landscape that speaks to on a very personal level but it is also a place that neither English or German describe well.  Look at the two pictures of this canyon on the Fraser and think about how short we are of words to name the features we can see.

Language matters because all languages are strongly tied to the time and place they come from.   Languages do evolve over time but always retain their core connection to the culture and place they come out of.  Protecting the land or the culture becomes very hard if the very words and phrases to describe it are lost.

English is a language that evolved to describe a cool, damp, and green island off of the coast of Europe.   In English there is no end of ways to talk about damp and rainy weather.   There are no end of words for small brooks or creeks, hills have a mass of words.  At the same time there is only one word for mountain, one word for a river, and one word for lake.   Green can be named in numerous ways but brown has few words and most of those recent created ones like "coffee" or "chocolate".

Aboriginal people are working hard to protect the lands they have inhabited since the start of human history.   In working for First Nations I could tell that there was something else going on about why the land mattered and that this is not simply a real estate transaction but few people could still express what the land means to them.

In St'at'imc, the word for the people (úcwalmicw) and the land (tmicw).    Who the St'at'imc are as a people and culture is tied to the land in a very intimate way but they can not describe this in English.   I have seen the frustration in leaders who know there is something more but they can not say what it is.   Working in English on aboriginal title and rights issues leads to frustration on all sides.

I remember living at Pavilion Lake and having this amazing changing landscape in front of my doorstep.  In the winter when the lake froze we suddenly had all this landscape to walk on.   We set up tables on it, we fished in the lake through holes in the ice, I took Laika for long walks on the ice.   What I could not do was easily describe this place.

View from our front door on Pavilion Lake

Ice is such a limited word.   Ice comes in so many forms on the lake.  Early in the season it is thin and growing to the middle from the edges.  It is relatively smooth at this point.  Once we could walk on it became something different.  It was not smooth and flat but bumpy and lumpy.  Snow that fell would be compacted on it.   The pressure of the ice would cause cracks and sections to rise up a bit.   It was nothing like an ice rink.    Late in the season the ice would melt in reverse from how it froze, the edges would come free first.   The ice would also completely change structure to something I have heard called rotten ice but it does not really describe what it was like.   Every day the ice on the lake was different and we only had one word to describe it.

The most amazing thing that would happen on the lake in the winter is when it would go down to -30.   At this point the ice would have cracks suddenly appear.   At night we would hear loud travelling booming sounds under the ice.   I have no easy way in English to describe this like.  It is as if rain had to cover mist and torrential downpour at the same time.

Ashcroft, a small town in a large landscape

I think it is important for everyone in BC to see a strong revival of the aboriginal languages so that we can find a better connection to the land.  If we are to do more than just exist day to day we need to be able to speak about what is around us.  We need to be able to name the places in an easy and specific way.   English as a global language is never going to make itself be BC specific but we do not need to have it become specific to BC when we have all these aboriginal languages that developed in this landscape.

Not being able to speak of the places we live in means we alienate ourselves from the world around us.  This is not healthy.

Farwell canyon

Ich Lehrne Deutsch

I grew up speaking German even though I was born in Vancouver.   I did not speak a word of English when I started kindergarten.   So how ever you slice it, German is my first language, my language of birth, the langauage of home and family.   With the death of my parents, the amount of German I speak or listen to has dropped off to almost nothing.  My German is now the weakest it has ever been in my life and I need to do something to fix this.

Growing up the language in the house was always German.   English was only spoken in the house when there was a Canadian over and did not know any German.   As a kid I went to German school on Saturday mornings till I was about 13 or 14.   I was left being able to speak German fluently like a kid, but not as an adult.

20 years ago I lived in the UK but was responsible for the German market for an English computer consulting company.  For two years till age 27 I spent most of my working hours speaking German - an odd situation in an open plan office of 50 English speakers.   It did mean that by the end of my time in the UK I could speak a much more fluent adult German especially when it came to do with anything to do with the IT business.

At the end of my time in England my parents visited us in London and my mother made one of the most embarssing comments to me that I had even been told - I spoke German like a person from Germany "Ach Berndti, du sprichts Deutsch wie ein Reichsdeutscher!".    Given that I am a Baltic German, this was hardly a positive remark and had a certain sense of I was being assimilated into being a German.   The best analogy I can think of for a Canadian would be to told that they sound like they are an American.

Back in Canada, for the next 16 years I would speak on the phone with my mother a couple of times a week and visit my parents in Tsawwassen a couple of times a month.   I probably spoke German for more than ten hours a month not counting times when I had guests from Germany staying with me or I when I was in Europe in 1995, 2001 or 2006.

My father died suddenly in June 2003 and my mother passed in early January 2009.   Since then the most common reason I have spoken German is when I have had guest staying with me from Germany.  I have been going months not speaking any German at all.     When Laurel and Thomas were staying with us last fall, I realized how weak my German had become.   I would try to hold a conversation and specific words or phrases simply would not come into my mind fast enough.   I needed to do something to improve my German.

It has taken me a time to figure out what I can do, but about a month ago I finally grasped upon the fact I can watch streaming TV from Germany.   I have been watching the majority of my TV in German for the last month either on ARD or ZDF.   I have been watching a lot of documentaries and a lot of 'Krimis' - police procedurals.

So is it improving my German?  I am certain that it is, I am being reintroduced to words that I really do not use myself, my German vocabulary that I can quickly call on is rather small.    It is really to expand my vocabulary  that I watch German TV.   I am not sure how to estimate it, but I am guessing that 5-10 words a day are moving from a passive vocabulary to an active state.   I have not had a of chance to speak German with anyone lately so I am not sure how easily the words will flow when called on.

In theory I could go to somewhere like the Edelweiss Club, but my problem is that at these social clubs the immigrant Germans are more German than the Germans.   Baltic Germans tend towards being completely unnationalistic.   I personally feel more kinship with the Swedes, Estonians, Finns and Russians than I do with people from Germany.

Germans abroad very easily suffer from a bunker mentality.   A sense that no one gets them and everyone sort of hates them.   They also tend to assume that no one can speak German other than Germans and all German speakers are on the same side.    This has lead to me being told more than a few times that Hitler was not that bad a man.   The most extreme example was in early 2005 when a man that was the selected Green candidate on the island was at an event with me.  Afterwards among about 40 Greens in the UVic University Club he bought me a drink and them proceeded to tell me in German that the holocaust was a Jewish hoax.

Growing up, other than German school, as a Baltic German in BC, we had nothing to do with the larger German community in Vancouver.

So I am in this odd situation, my first language is getting weaker all the time but the country connected to that language does not feel like home.   I have a desire to speak German, really to speak the Baltic German dialect, but there is not much of a chance to do that.

• Mon Français est bien mieux qu'il était, mais toujours non couramment
• Jag vill lära mig svenska
• Nagu ma olen Eesti kodanik, ma peaks eesti keelt