Ramzy: Why diaspora communities in Canada are struggling to keep their first languages alive

Multiculturalism was always about integration into one of the two official languages. In the initial years, the program did support other languages, some of which is now provided at the provincial level (our kids attended farsi school for a few years in Ottawa). Enhancement of other languages was and is in that context as speaking an official language is crucial to integration:

Saiful Bhuiyan, who immigrated to Canada from Bangladesh via the United States two decades ago, is immensely proud of his two children. One is a software engineer and the other, a stem cell research scientist.

But, even over Zoom, I can see that underneath the pride lies sorrow. Bhuiyan, 59, who has built a successful accountancy business, fears that his children are losing their ability to speak Bangla, the family’s mother tongue.

“Now that they’re grown up … they’re talking among themselves in English, except when they’re talking with us,” he says from his home office in Windsor, Ont., a framed certificate hung on the stark white walls of the room. “And in the next generation, they might not be using it.”

At one point, he was so tormented by the loss that he became ill. He’s all too aware of the larger symbolism of language. After the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the newly formed government of Pakistan tried to make Urdu the sole national language, nearly outlawing Bhuiyan’s mother tongue. The move sparked the Bengali language movement and ultimately the Bangladesh War of Independence. The trauma of almost losing the Bangla language lives on in him.

“When I’m dying, I might not see anybody around me who can speak the language I love, the mother tongue I had when I was born,” he say.

His fears are real. Canada prides itself on being an international beacon of multiculturalism; nearly one in four people in Canada today is an immigrant. The country relies on newcomers to boost both population and productivity and aims to increase immigration levels to 500,000 newcomers a year by 2025. Yet its Multiculturalism Act, which enshrines the right of immigrants and Indigenous peoples to protect, preserve and enhance their mother tongues with government support, is falling short.

Mother tongues are in steep decline, generation over generation. Many arrive here not realizing they are likely to be the last generation in their family to speak their language. Worse, the important role of language in preserving culture is being ignored, say experts and advocates. “It’s not possible to have multiculturalism without multilingualism,” says Slava Balan, a human rights researcher and a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa who immigrated to Quebec from Moldova. “If cultures are only reduced to the dances, songs, cuisine and all this stuff, that’s just a pretence. That’s not real multiculturalism.”

Some immigrants are finding innovative solutions on their own, while calling on governments across Canada to fulfil their responsibility to help preserve mother tongues.

Chief among those advocates is Bhuiyan. As a director with the Mother Language Lovers of the World Society and the former president of the Bangladesh-Canada Association in Windsor, he’s become one of Canada’s most passionate defenders of mother tongues. His work has helped lead to the recognition of mother tongues, from his city all the way to the federal level.

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Language has been a political flashpoint in Canada for years. In the 1960s, amid increased tensions between francophones and anglophones, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalismexplored calls to protect the French language. But concerns from diaspora groups persuaded the commission to expand its scope to recognize how other ethnic groups contribute to Canada, too. In 1971, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau introduced Canada’s multiculturalism policy, positioning it within Canada’s bilingual model.

The move set up Canada as a hub of diversity, but it also set the stage for complications. Notably, Quebec has rejected multiculturalism in fear of losing francophone culture, language and tradition. Without adopting an official policy, Quebec has instead promoted the ideal of “interculturalism,” which aims to adapt newcomers to its French-speaking society.

Nevertheless, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, passed in 1988, enshrined the federal government’s commitment to promoting and maintaining an equal, diverse society in Canada. It was the first of its kind in the world and changed Canada’s sense of self. But its implementation on languages has been disappointing.

For example, by 1991, Parliament had established the Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship to create programs for cross-cultural understanding, heritage cultures and languages, and community support and participation. The Canadian Heritage Languages Institute Act came into effect the same year, in a bid to establish an institute in Edmonton to develop resources and standards for ethnic minority language classes in Canada. But its creation was deferred in the 1992 budget and repealed before coming into force.

While statistics are scarce, academic studies suggest that funding for heritage language retention and education has only decreased in the decades since. Federal support started strong with nearly $200 million during the first decade after the 1971 policy passed. A study in 2005 by Anjali Lowe, then a master’s student at the University of Victoria, found that it ended after that as the government chose to exclude language from its interpretation of multiculturalism. Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario offered heritage language funding through the public education system early on but have slowly phased it out, too, the study says. It adds up to failing to honour the role languages play in sustaining multiculturalism.

Bhuiyan’s experience proves the point. Despite being in communication with elected officials at all levels of government, his community still struggles to find funds for cultural events, placing a heavy burden on members to pay for these initiatives on their own.

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Across Canada, census data show two interconnected, overwhelming trends. First, immigrants whose language is neither French nor English are arriving in strong numbers. Of the 1.3 million immigrants who arrived in Canada between 2016 and 2021, more than 900,000 had a non-official mother tongue. Today, there are nearly 400 non-official mother tongues in Canada.

Second, their children and grandchildren are leaving those languages behind in favour of the two official ones. The numbers are dramatic. About 6.3 million immigrants in Canada have a mother tongue that isn’t French or English. Among second-generation Canadians, it’s 1.2 million. By the third generation, only 250,000 people have a mother tongue other than English and French.

It’s a phenomenon I’ve felt in my own life. I immigrated to Canada from Egypt with my family as a nine-year-old in 2013. I was fluent in Arabic, my mother tongue, as well as English, and I had a better knowledge of French than the average Canadian anglophone child. But for some reason, I felt like my near-trilingualism was a curse, not a gift.

In the decade since, as I’ve struggled to make sense of who I am, I’ve found myself belittling my unique identity — responding to my parents in English rather than in Arabic and immersing myself in western pop culture to make up for missed years.

It didn’t help that all around me, I received the message that to fit in and succeed, I had to assimilate myself into this new society. Some of the messages were direct. At nine, I had to take English as a second language, a class I hardly needed. I faced comments from classmates about my slight accent. But other pressure was subtle, like encouragement from many adults in my life to become fluent in French rather than retain my mother tongue.

I’m not alone in this. Amir Kalan, an assistant professor of language and literary education at McGill University in Montreal, says his research shows this phenomenon is common among immigrant children. That’s why advocates like Bhuiyan are desperate for change. Preserving mother tongues in Can- ada — all 400 or so of them — is essential to protecting our multiculturalism, he says. “If slowly all the language is lost, culture is lost, diversity is lost, meaning that it’s going to be one country with one language and one culture, which is not colourful,” Bhuiyan says.

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Canada’s diverse Indigenous communities know this feeling all too well. Across the country, Indigenous Peoples are fighting to reclaim their languages, which were violently suppressed after settlers arrived in Canada. Under the Multiculturalism Act and the 2019 Indigenous Languages Act, Indigenous communities are beginning to receive greater long-term funding to support language revitalization. But long before government support increased, Indigenous Peoples had to find their own innovative ways to revitalize their languages, says Lorna Wanosts’a7 Williams, professor emerita of Indigenous education, curriculum and instruction at the University of Victoria. She is the Canada Research Chair in Education and Linguistics.

Williams, a residential school survivor from the Lil’wat First Nation in Mount Currie, B.C., has dedicated her life to revitalizing Indigenous languages and providing models for other language learners as well. “One of the first things that we have to work on constantly, all of us together, is that multilingualism is a gift to the world,” Williams says. “Each of the languages portrays a very different relationship in the world that we live in and it gives us a little different understanding of this world.”

She started helping shape the curriculum for the community-led schools in her Nation with the help of a Dutch linguist between the 1960s and 1980s. “We had to develop a writing system for our language, because, like most Indigenous languages, our language is oral…but we live in a very literate environment,” she says. In doing so, Williams and her community ensured the survival of their mother tongue, Ucwalmícwts. And since then, her work has grown to help preserve other languages, too.

While government support is not nearly enough yet for Indigenous and other non-official languages, Williams hopes Canada can realize that every language can bring new knowledge to our country. “Multilingualism isn’t a divide,” she says. “Because that’s what has always been promoted, that if people speak many different languages, it hinders communication and a sense of togetherness. But it doesn’t.”

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There are some bright spots. In April, a bill by Sen. Mobina Jaffer that called for Feb. 21 to be recognized as the annual International Mother Language Day in Canada passed with wide bipartisan support. Jaffer, who speaks Kutchi, introduced the bill in 2017, but it failed to gain momentum in the Senate through multiple attempts over four years. The bill is largely symbolic and makes no mention of the government’s mandate to support heritage languages. But it’s a step forward in recognizing Canada’s diverse communities and the languages they bring with them.

Jaffer’s attachment to her mother tongue is deeply personal. She arrived from Uganda after Idi Amin, the former dictator and president, expelled thousands of South Asians from that country in 1972. For her, and for many in other diaspora communities, language is identity.

Source: Why diaspora communities in Canada are struggling to keep their … – Broadview Magazine