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Ontario moves to allow use of Indigenous languages in legislature
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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About time.
I do wonder, though, from a practical standpoint, how difficult it might be to get translators for languages that now have very few speakers, like Oneida or Cayuga.
According to StatsCan, there are about 237,000 speakers of all 70 indigenous languages combined in Canada. That number declined by 4.3% between 2016 and 2021. The most common indigenous language is Cree (86,000 speakers).
For comparison, there are 667,000 Punjabi speakers, a number that increased by 33% over the same time period. I wouldn't be surprised if that number is close to a million now, given how fast our population is growing.
It isn't about which language has the most speakers, it's about acknowledging history. (I mean, if "who has the most speakers" were the only important thing, French wouldn't be allowed either—Ontario is not required by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to provide provincial government services in French, but does so to some extent anyway, for historical and practical reasons.)
How the languages of large immigrant communities should be handled in official contexts is a completely separate matter from this.
Okay, bud. I was just supporting the conversation with what I thought was interesting contextual info, partially in support of your point. But I guess you couldn't miss the opportunity to virtue signal. Good job.
I don't think they're disputing that. They're just giving numbers to answer your question. There's very few speakers of these languages, so it's probably not going to be an easy task.