Category Archives: Mi’gmaq in the Community

A few quotes on the importance of keeping our Indigenous languages alive

Posted on by Vicky
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Language is our soul.
(Aunty Rose Fernando, Gamilaroi Elder, 1998)

Language is the expression of our culture and our land. We cannot have one without the others. We cannot describe our culture and our land if we do not have language.
(Queensland Indigenous Languages Advisory Committee, 2006 )

Recognition of Indigenous languages and support for Indigenous language programs stand alongside land rights, health, justice, education, housing, employment and other services as part of the overall process of pursuing social justice and reconciliation in Australia.

One might go so far as to say that without recognition of the Indigenous people and their languages, many other programs will be less effective, because this lack of recognition will show that the underlying attitudes of the dominant society have not changed significantly.
(Dr. Graham McKay. Edith Cowan University. The Land Still Speaks. 1996.)

Gigpesaq!

Posted on by Carol Rose
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Sepei gigpesaqaq aq nige’ alugwig… Saponug na’gusetewitew!

Hello from rainy Listuguj! Good thing we have been learning about the weather because sepei ma’munloqap (it was pouring this morning!)

Students, both in the post secondary class and the high school graduate class, have been learning (and mastering!) many different grammatical and lexical elements of the Mi’gmaq language from inanimate intransitive verb paradigms to body parts!

Mi’gmaq summer courses commence!

Posted on by Carol Rose
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Hello all!

Today was the first day of classes (however there was some confusion and turnout wasn’t optimal, but we will recruit more tonight!).

The first lesson starts out by the students learning how to introduce themselves and talk a bit about their families and where they come from. By learning all this, at the same time students are learning many grammatical elements without all the dreaded tables and parsing!! This is the beauty of this teaching method: the situational phrases also convey key grammatical elements (this is the grammar-phobe friendly method 😉 ). For example at the beginning of the class the students learn how to say where they live (e.g. Wigi Muliang ‘I live in Montreal’). The –g ending denotes location. Later on in the lesson this comes in handy when the students learn places and various nouns like jinm ‘man’, gisisgwisgw ‘elderly woman’, and patawti ‘table’, awti ‘road’ etc. Then the students can make sentences like jinm gaqamit patawtigtug ‘the man is standing by the table’. The locative ending surfaces again with patawti ‘table’ (although in a different form, but the introduction of the locative ending at the beginning of the lesson makes this concept easier to grasp once learning how to construct longer phrases). And thus the lessons go!

One of the goals for this summer is to document the curriculum for the Mi’gmaq lessons. By the end of the summer we will have generated a kind of curriculum from the lessons to act as a guide for future instructors of Mi’gmaq. Lessons will be divided up by content, so for example one class which meets for 1.5 hours could contain more than one lesson. For example today there were two lessons (Lesson 1: teluisi…’My name is…’ and Lesson 2: jinm gaqamit… ‘The man is standing…’). Lesson 1 comprises of introductions of oneself whereas Lesson 2 comprises of creating basic sentences (as exemplified above). An example of a lesson and a lesson template for this methodology will be posted soon!

All in all, so far so good! We are all looking forward to some spectacular classes and learning more and more Mi’gmaq! 🙂

CAN-8 Update

Posted on by Elise
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Hello, folks! Reporting from Listuguj here, where there has been a lot of work done towards setting up CAN-8 for real live users. We’ve been focussing on

  • making connections with (potential) users of the program
  • establishing a work-flow that works for people involved in the project (more on this below), and
  • recording and uploading content

We’ll start off talking about that first point, making connections. We’re hoping to create a CAN-8 that is geared towards the people using it. Part of this is listening the input of anybody who has an opinion to give. Vicky Metallic has been getting the word out to people outside the Education Complex that the CAN-8 project is happening, and that another tool for Mi’gmaq-learning will be added to the considerable resources that the community already has at its fingertips. We’ve all been talking to people, and in doing so, we’ve also been taking the advice of the people who have seen the program. We’ll use their input to select scenarios for dialogue-making, so that our content is relevant to the lives of the people who are using it.

Next up, the question of “how do the dialogues get made, anyway”? The fine details of this process are still being hammered out, but we have a general outline that works well for us! We write scripts in part-English, part-Mi’gmaq, then Joe Wilmot and his trusty team work with us to tweak the scripts so they flow like real Mi’gmaq. Once the scripts are speaker-worthy, Joe et al record them. The resulting sound files and Mi’gmaq scripts go into CAN-8, so far by my hands, but hopefully this will become a Montreal job soon. And later, we will write up helpful meta-linguistic notes which also go into CAN-8 for the users’ enjoyment.

There are two kinds of dialogue: implicit teaching ones, and daily life ones. These two categories do overlap quite a bit sometimes, but they aren’t one and the same!

For the implicit teaching dialogues:

  • Conor and I work on establishing corners of the grammar that might be tricky for learners to pick up directly from speakers–there is a lot that people can learn from the speakers around them, but we’d like to give people some scaffolding to base that knowledge on, and make speaker-knowledge more accessible to more people.
  • Once these corners are picked, we then use a theme to construct a little scene. One starts with a boy telling a girl, “I love you!” and she replies, “You love me, but I don’t love you.”–they talk to each other, and explain the predicament to others, and (spoilers!) he eventually wins her over. The aim of this dialogue is to demonstrate TA morphology in a (hopefully) fun and funny way!
  • Lastly, we give an overt, meta-linguistic description of the phenomenon in question. We also encourage the CAN-8 learner to go back to the dialogue they just heard with these meta-linguistic notes in mind, and will provide a CAN-8 space to experiment with the forms on their own.

The daily life dialogues are a little different. We don’t have many of them, but we’ll collect more as the summer goes on!

  • Two (or maybe three) speakers record a mostly-improvised chat about topics that are likely to come up. One chat that we have already uploaded features a phone call between two speakers, where one invites the other to go across the river for some shopping.
  • We then go over the recording with the speakers in question, and transcribe the exchange. This transcription gives CAN-8 users a chance to familiarize themselves with the orthography we’re using, as well as something to hang on to (as this speech tends to be a little faster than the scripted dialogue speech).
  • The dialogues are then uploaded! The advantage of these improvised chats is that they are less artificial than the scripts, and will give the CAN-8 user a window into natural speech that they are likely to hear (and eventually produce) with the speakers in their lives.

We’ve also uploaded the rhythmic profiles that we’ve talked about in a previous post, and Roger Metallic is working on Mi’gmaq-izing some of the Akwesasne verb conjugations and integrating them into the Listuguj CAN-8, too. There’s a lot going on, here!

And, as always, please chat with us in comments!

  • What do you think of our plan and strategy? What are the things that we’re missing?
  • Do you have any suggestions for material to cover?
  • Do you have suggestions for new methods to use to show linguistic patterns?
  • What have been your favourite bits about self-directed language-learning programs in the past? Should our CAN-8 program have them, too?

A question for discussion

Posted on by Jessica
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Laura, a blog-reader from the Eskasoni Mi’kmaw Nation, writes with the following question, which I would love to open up for discussion:

 I would like to know some ways that your group is encouraging speaking of the language.  Our biggest challenge is getting our people, young and old, to have the courage to actually speak it.  They are too afraid to make a mistake and get embarrassed, even my own children.

For our collaborators in Listuguj: do you see a similar problem there? For everyone: what are ways we can facilitate speaking? How can we help create safe spaces where people can practice speaking, without worrying about feeling embarrassed? What are strategies other readers have used to overcome feeling embarrassed when learning a new language? What can fluent speakers to to help?

Passive Speakers/Fluent Comprehenders/Receptive Bilinguals

Posted on by Gretchen
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Another of the talks that I found interesting at OWNAL was about people who understand their heritage language but don’t speak it, and talking about some of the reasons why this happens and how to make people feel more comfortable speaking. This is a really common situation for a lot of minority languages, and there are several names that people use for it, including passive speakers, fluent comprehenders, or receptive bilinguals.

One of the suggestions that I remember from the question period is that passive speakers may not feel comfortable speaking around Elders or other fluent speakers because they’re worried about speaking incorrectly, so there are people in one community who have organized small groups of people around the same age and comfort level who get together and talk in their language without anyone else around to get intimidated by.

I also found this very long but interesting article (it does have a table of contents though!) about heritage language learners of Spanish taking Spanish classes and the effects of their attitude towards learning and their identity. It’s not Mi’gmaq or even an Algonquian language, but some of the material is pretty general.

Bilingualism and the brain

Posted on by Jessica
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Check out today’s New York Times for an article titled “The Benefits of Bilingualism: Why Bilinguals are Smarter“.

What does this have to do with Mi’gmaq? Many endangered languages of the world––including languages of the Americas––have arrived at their current state because of education policies designed to “help” children assimilate to the dominate culture, whether this be English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, French-speaking, etc. The logic went (and often still goes…): if a child speaks Mi’gmaq at home, it will slow down her ability to learn English, putting her at a disadvantage later in life.

Work in recent decades, as discussed in this NYT article, points to a much different conclusion, but one that many people have suspected all along: bilingualism is good for kids! Not only from a cultural point of you, but also from a cognitive point of view. This is obviously good news for advocates of revitalizing indigenous languages. The issue is not a choice between maintaining one’s cultural heritage and linguistic identity versus being able to communicate in the dominant language. Rather, having access to two languages is not only a natural state, but one with clear benefits.

Question: Do you know of other work documenting the benefits––cognitive, cultural, political, etc.––of bilingualism? Please post to the comments!