#wakashan

[skiddo-xy]

🇨🇦 Langblr Challenge Day 13: How Many Languages Are Spoken In Your Country? 🇨🇦

In this post: official languages, Indigenous languages, more recent immigrant languages. Touches on language and dialect diversity as well as preservation/revitalization. Statistic bomb so you don't get bored: there are over 200 languages spoken in Canada.

Been waiting a while for a day when I have lots of time so I can medium dive into my country of Canada 🇨🇦

Part I: Official Languages

So officially, we have two official languages: English and French, both directly tied to our country's colonial history. Here is a map of Canada, where 1 represents the area/s where English is predominant, 2 represents the area/s where English and French are roughly equally predominant (bilingual belt) while 3 represents the area where French is predominant. And everywhere else is where the population density is less than 0.4/km, yes we are that sparse

We also have multple varieties of French in Canada, the most known Quebecois French, Acadian French, Chiac etc.

In my experience, French Immersion programs, public school programs in which Anglophone children only are spoken to in French and they learn it naturally--not to say these kids speak it natively, they still learn advanced grammar etc all throughout school--are common in major urban centres from in or close to the bilingual belt in Canada. I myself am in one of these programs (you can drop it after first year of high school, but if you do it all throughout highschool you can get an additional French-language diploma) and though I recognize its problems (especially as someone who has lived in Francophone places as well) I am very grateful for the opportunities it has provided me with.

Bilingualism, especially in Quebec, is a debated political subject in Canada. Here are some recent news articles:

Quebec language watchdog orders café to make Instagram posts in French

23 bilingual Quebec municipalities challenge province's new language law in court

Quebec's tuition hike triggers financial strain for English universities as enrolment drops

Part II: Indigenous Languages

Canada is home to over 70 Indigenous languages from about 12 Indigenous language families: Algonquian, Inuit, Athabaskan, Siouan, Salish, Tsimshian, Wakashan, Iroquoian, Michif, Tlingit, Kutenai & Haida.

Unfortunately, due to Canada's long history of colinization, all of these languages are now endangered. This is mostly attributed to Canada's past residential school system, in which Indigenous children were taken from their homes to attend English or French-language boarding schools and critical to the language situation, abused for speaking their ancestral tongue. More on residential schools.

Not all is lost though! In 2019, the Indigenous Languages Act was enacted which pledged government funding towards the reviatalization and sustainment of Indigenous languages as part of the 94 Calls to Action established by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation commission written to establish reconciliation for Indigenous Canadians and Canada.

Currently, 9 Indigenous languages are recognized as official in the Northwest Territories federal subdivision (Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, Inuvialuktun, Gwich'in, North Slavey, South Slavey, Tłı̨chǫ, Chipewyan, Cree) alongside English and French, while in the territory of Nunavut, Inuktut (both Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun dialects) are recognized as official alongside English and French.

Recent news: Inuktut became first Indigenous language of Canada to be available on Google Translate as of 2 weeks ago! Try it out using Latin Inuktut or Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Inuktut! Please note that Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics are not actually Indigneous to Canada, they were developed by missionaries to facilitate the spread of Christianity among Indigenous Canadians. Indigneous languages of Canada were traditionally unwritten.

Also: searchable glossary of Indigenous place names in Canada, interactive map

Part III: (More Recent) Immigrant Languages

This section basically encompasses everything else in Canada. Some highlights:

Mandarin is spoken by 679,255 people as of the 2021 census (1.9% of the population

Canadian Ukrainian, a dialect from 1920's western Ukraine with adapted English words for new things such as кеш реґистер/kesh regyster (cash register) (fun fact: Canada is home to the 2nd largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world!)

Canadian Gaelic, pretty similar to Canadian Ukrainian's history but with Scottish Gaelic, most prevalent in rural communities of Canada's Nova Scotia (lit. "New Scotland") province

Plautdietsch, the Mennonite dialect/s of the Low German dialect of German, with Frisian and Flemish aspects, most Canadian speakers are Mennonites who immigrated to Canada from Russian Empire-era South Ukraine (P.S this is totally not self promo or anything but I have a bunch of posts about Plautdietsch on my blog as someone whose great-grandparents were native Plautdietsch speakers under the tag #plautdietsch)

And there's so much more to learn, not just for languages exclusive to/most common in Canada! You can look at the link I just linked or go here for raw data from the 2021 census and then "find in page" your way to the "language"s section

End

This is a subject I think is super neat so I'm glad I got an outlet to write about that. There's so much more I could've talked about, so for futher reading you can check out this Wikipedia article. If you made it this far, THANK YOU

[japhugmafia]

[charring58]

Nuxalk; it is a derivation of the neighbouring #Wakashan-speaking coastal Heiltsuk people's name for the Nuxalk as bəlxwəlá or bḷ́xʷlá, meaning "stranger" (rendered plxwla in Nuxalk orthography). With

[twinkl22004]

Sheila Embleton (1985), “Lexicostatistics applied to the Germanic,Romance, and Wakashan families”, Word, volume 36, pages 37-60.

Morris Swadesh’, “Salish Internal Relationships”, International Journal of American Linguistics, year 1950, volume #16, pages 157-167 was the topic of an earlier blog post. Here I present: Sheila Embleton (1985), “Lexicostatistics applied to the Germanic,Romance, and Wakashan families”, Word, volume 36, pages  37-60.   The “exponential decay function” of vocabulary in the Morris Swadesh’ method…

[linguisticdiscovery]

Today's word of the day is from the Nuuchahnulth language, a member of the Wakashan language family, spoken along the coast of British Columbia, Canada. To ring in the new year, I chose the word kʷiisqšiʔaƛ 'it became another year'.

This is a great example of what words in Nuuchahnulth are like because it's a verb meaning 'to be a different year'. The root is kʷis- 'to be different', and it has a suffix -q 'year'. After that it also has a momentaneous suffix, which you add to verbs to conceptualize the event as happening at a single point in time, as well as a telic suffix, meaning that you conceptualize the event as having been completed. This type of word is extremely common in Nuuchahnulth. Almost anything in Nuuchahnulth can be a verb, and it has a whole slew of lexical suffixes that in other languages would be separate words, such as 'year', or 'house' or 'beach'. So this is a beautiful example of how the Nuuchahnulth language works.

[vocalfriespod]

Now with transcript!

[phonaesthemes]

Nuu-chah-nulth master carver Tim Paul has started work on a totem pole that intends to raise awareness of threatened Indigenous languages.

The pole is being carved out of an 800-year-old, 23 metre-high red cedar tree that likely came down during a windstorm 50 years ago near Bamfield, on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

The totem pole is being created in honour of the United Nations Year of Indigenous Languages. Paul is carving the piece at a time when his language, Nuu-chah-nulth, is at great risk of becoming extinct.

"We really need to not only deal with the language and save what we have left, but we also need to upkeep and re-educate ourselves of the cultural teachings within our families," Paul told All Points West guest host Megan Thomas. Paul is of the Hesquiaht tribe of the Nuu-chah-nulth,and says this project is special to him because his grandmother was very concerned about their traditional language.

"She revered the language, she spoke the language and she wanted to hold it and pass it on down to my aunts and uncles," he said. 

[gwendolynlerman]

Languages of the world

Nuu-chah-nulth (nuučaan̓uɫ)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 130

Spoken in: Canada

Script: Latin, 47 letters

Grammatical cases: 0

Linguistic typology: polysynthetic, VSO

Language family: Wakashan, Southern

Number of dialects: 12

History

1815 - first printed Nuu-chah-nulth words

1939 - first texts in the language

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the script: a b c c̕ č č̕ d e h ḥ i k k̕ kʷ k̕ʷ l l̕ ł ƛ ƛ̕ m m̕ n n̕ ŋ o p p̕ q q̕ qʷ q̕ʷ s š t t̕ u w w̕ x xʷ x̣ x̣ʷ y y̕ ʕ ʔ.

Long vowels are doubled. There is also a third class of vowels, which are long within the first two syllables of a word and short elsewhere.

Grammar

Nouns have two numbers (singular and plural). Marking the latter is optional in all cases, except in kinship terms.

Possession is marked by possessive pronouns, clitics, and suffixes. There are no articles or adpositions.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. Nuu-chah-nulth distinguishes general and near future, similar to English “will” and “going to”.

Dialects

There are 12 dialects: Ahousaht, Clayoquot, Ehattesaht, Hesquiat, Kyuquot, Mowachaht, Nuchatlaht, Ohiaht, Toquaht, Tseshaht, Uchuklesaht, and Ucluelet. However, some sources distinguish between 14 and 20 varieties.

They differ in phonology, morphology, and vocabulary.

[pararennial-archived]

Hey all, I’ve been wanting to compile a resource post regarding the current situation at home. When I say home, I mean the province British Columbia, on unceded, ancestral, and traditional territories of First Nation peoples of the following language groups: Wakashan, Salishan, Ktunaxa, Tsimshianic, Haida, Dene, and Algonquin. 

BC is flooded, with sudden and heavy rainstorms in the last week and at present has flooded many communities near the southern interior of the province. Highways are destroyed by mudslides, roads, farmlands, and homes are flooded, rivers are rising above the banks, and evacuation orders have been made for towns that have yet to evacuate. Here are some organizations you can donate to if you can, but if not please spread this around!

Abbotsford Disaster Relief Fund

BC Search and Rescue Association

United Way for British Columbia

Food Banks BC

BC Agriculture Council

BC SPCA

Disaster Aid Canada

Mamas for Mamas

First Nations Emergency Services Society

[salvadorbonaparte]

Nuu-chah-nulth Resources

Wikipedia

Omniglot

Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council

First Voices

The Sound of the Nuu-chah-nulth language

Youtube Lessons

Cooking Show

MEGA drive

Nuu-chah-nulth (also known as Nootka) is a Wakashan language spoken in what is now Canada (British Columbia). It uses the Latin Alphabet but with a fair number of symbols not used in English. 

[liskantope]

Journey Through Languages project: languages of North America

Whew -- I don’t think I’ve ever squeezed so many distinct language families onto only one list (well, I didn’t actually bother putting listing any of the Wintuan and Chumashan languages since they’re pretty much all extinct and easily available information is sparse), plus some language isolates on the side, but here are what look to me like all of the remaining languages native to North America. (Some language families such as Uzo-Aztecan, which clearly have some languages spoken in southwest US will be included on the Central American Languages list.) As usual it became a bit hard to pick and choose, especially given how many of the languages shown on Wikipedia are extinct yet have detailed pages, and also given my biases as someone who grew up in America and is curious about the languages that used to be spoken in various familiar places.

      Haida

Na-Dene languages

      Tlingit*

   Athabaskan languages

      Dena’ina       Tanacross       Tutchone       Gwich’in       Kaska       Slavey       Dogrib       Chipewyan       Babine-Witsuwit’en       Carrier

   Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages

      Hupa

   Southern Athabaskan languages

      Mescalero-Chiricahua       Navajo*       (Western) Apache

Wakashan languages

      Haisla       Kwak’wala

Salishan languages

      Nuxalk (Bella Coola)       Comox       Halkomelem       Shuswap       Lillooet       Thompson       Okanagan

      Kutenai

Penutian languages

      Sahaptin

Wintuan languages

Chumashan languages

Algic languages (Proto-Algic)

   Algonquian languages (Proto-Algonquian)

      Plains Algonquian languages          Blackfoot*          Arapaho          Cheyenne       Central Algonquian languages          Cree*          Menominee          Ojibwe*          Potawatomi          Fox*          Shawnee          Miami-Illinois       Eastern Algonquian languages          Mi’kmaq          Abenaki          Maliseet-Passamaquoddy          Massachusett          Delaware*

Siouan languages

      Crow*       Hidatsa       Sioux       Lakota (Sioux)       Dakota (Sioux*)       Assiniboine       Stony       Winnebago       Osage*

Iroquoian languages (Proto-Iroquoian)

      Onondaga       Cayuga       Seneca*       Oneida       Mohawk*       Tuscarora       Cherokee*

Caddoan languages

      Caddo

      Wichita

Tanoan languages

      Jemez       Taos       (Southern) Tiwa       Tewa

      Yuci

Muskogean languages

      Chickasaw*       Choctaw*       Muscogee (Creek*)       Mikasuki (Seminole)       Alabama       Koasati

      Tunica

      Keres

Hokan languages

   Yuman–Cochimí languages       Quechan       Maricopa       Mojave

      Seri

      Tol

      Zuni

[ayearinlanguage]

A Year in Language, Day 223: Nuu-chah-nulth Nuu-chah-nulth, and the people of the same name, are more commonly known to the outside world as "Nootka" though that terminology is not self-designated. It is a native language of the Pacific Northwest and is still spoken by a hundred or so people on Vancouver Island. Nuu-chah-nulth is the source of the English word "potlatch", the gifting and feasting tradition common to all native people of the region. It is also one of the primary source of words for the pidgin language known as Chinook Jargon, which was once used for trade from Alaska to Oregon. Nuu-chah-nulth is a member of a language family known as Wakashan, but is a part of the Pacific Northwestern language area and as such has many features typical of those language, even ones unrelated to it. The features include ejective consonants, lateral fricatives, and uvular consonants.

[americanling]

Giant consonant inventories in western North America

The Americas are one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world, particularly Western North America, where rugged geography allowed dozens of individual language families, each with 5, 10, or 15 languages to each, spring up in incredibly close proximity. These languages, besides the occasional word, share little with one another, except for one thing: large consonant inventories.

When being described, languages are ascribed a consonant inventory, a list of consonants used by the language speakers. The size range of consonant inventories varies drastically, from the six of Papua New Guinea’s Rotokas, to the 122 of Botswana’s !Xóõ, but the average tends to hover between 18 and 25. the Romance languages, especially Spanish and Italian, are especially good examples of standard inventory sizes, having roughly 19 and 22, respectively.

With this in mind, the languages west of the Rockies are distinct in their dramatically above-average consonant numbers. As categorized by the World Atlas of Language Structures, north of the San Francisco Bay, only four languages are anything less than moderately large, and north of the California-Oregon border, none are. The WALS map is kind of bare north of Coast Tsimshian, but Deg Xinag, Upper Tanana, Hän, and Gwich’in all are well above what WALS classifies as “large,” and those are only languages in central Alaska/Yukon.

Even more interesting than this, as WALS says, is that “the languages in this latter area belong to a number of different language families with no demonstrable genealogical relationship, including Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, Salishan, Tsimshianic and Wakashan, among others. There is no evidence that the predominance of large consonant inventories in this area is a consequence of direct borrowing of words between these languages.” This contrasts with Southern Africa, another area known for its large consonant inventories; however, many of the languages there, including Zulu and Xhosa, borrowed many of their consonants from other languages. based on all heretofore-found evidence, no consonants were borrowed in the Northwest.

So how did these massive inventories manifest? Let’s look at Hän, with its whopping 50 consonants, to see. One of the more notable things is how full its consonant inventory is. Most inventories are shown as tables with where the consonant is made in the mouth on top, and how it’s made on the side, and most of these tables tend to be notably empty, with only a few of the possible combinations filled. English is a good example of this. This isn’t so with Hän, though, nor with most of these languages, where there aren’t many open spots; the only notable one is the stops between the alveolar and velar positions, whose sounds are rare globally and unheard of in North America. Elsewhere, the table is filled to the brim. Also notable is how Hän modifies its consonants. Most languages have only two ways to modify a base consonant, either a voiced-unvoiced pair or an plain-aspirated pair, but in parts of the table there’s up to four ways: plain, aspirated, ejectivized, and prenasalized. Given the filled nature of the inventory, these two combined allow for dramatically higher numbers of consonants than in most languages.

[xtruss]

Ozette: The US' Lost 2,000-Year-Old Village

In 1970, a violent storm uncovered a Makah village that was buried by a mudslide more than 300 years earlier. A newly re-opened museum tells the fascinating story of the ancient site.

— By Brendan Sainsbury | 6th June 2022

Image credit: Paulacobleigh/Getty Images

Coming to the end of a short, winding trail, I found myself standing in the extreme north-west corner of the contiguous US, a wild, forested realm where white-capped waves slam against the isolated Washington coast with a savage ferocity. Buttressed by vertiginous cliffs battling with the corrosive power of the Pacific, Cape Flattery has an elemental, edge-of-continent feel. No town adorns this stormy promontory. The nearest settlement, Neah Bay, sits eight miles away by road, a diminutive coast-hugging community that is home to the Makah, an indigenous tribe who have fished and thrived in this region for centuries.

The Makah are represented by the motif of a thunderbird perched atop a whale, and their story is closely linked to the sea.

"The Makah is the only tribe with explicit treaty rights to whale hunting in the US," explained Rebekah Monette, a tribal member and historic preservation programme manager. "Our expertise in whaling distinguished us from other tribes. It was very important culturally. In the stratification of Makah society, whaling was at the top of the hierarchy. Hunting had the capacity to supply food for a vast number of people and raw material for tools."

After reading recent news stories about the Makah's whaling rights and the impact of climate change on their traditional waters, I had come to their 27,000-acre reservation on Washington's Olympic Peninsula to learn more, by visiting a unique tribal museum that has just reopened after a two-year hiatus due to Covid-19.

The imposing statues outside the Makah Museum wear distinctive cedar-bark rain hats (Credit: Brendan Sainsbury)

Due to a trick of fate, Makah history is exceptionally well-documented. In contrast to other North American civilisations, a snapshot of their past was captured and preserved by a single cataclysmic episode. In 1970, a brutal Pacific storm uncovered part of an abandoned coastal Makah village called Ozette located 15 miles south of Cape Flattery. Part of the village had been buried by a mudslide that was possibly triggered by a dramatic seismic event around 1700, almost a century before the first European contact. Indeed, recent research argues that ancestors of the Makah – or related Wakashan speaking people – have been present in the area for at least 4,000 years, which, if proven, would change our understanding of prehistory in the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island.

Miraculously, the mud had protected embedded organic matter by sealing it off from the air. As a result, thousands of well-preserved artefacts that would normally have rotted – from intact woven cedar baskets to dog-hair blankets and wooden storage boxes – were able to be painstakingly unearthed during a pioneering archaeological dig.

Due to the suddenness of the event and the exceptional levels of preservation, scientists hailed the find a "Western Pompeii" and the Washington Post called it "the most comprehensive collection of artefacts of a pre-European-contact Indian culture ever discovered in the United States".

Anxious the material might be engulfed by the sea and lost, the tribe called in Richard Daugherty, an influential archaeologist at Washington State University who'd been involved in fieldwork in the area since the 1940s. Having good connections with Congress, Daugherty helped secure federal funding for an exhaustive excavation.

Makan petroglyphs can still be seen at Wedding Rocks, just south of the Ozette archaeological site (Credit: Natalie Fobes/Getty Images)

"Dr Daugherty was instrumental in the excavation work," recounted Monette. "He was very progressive and interested in working alongside the tribe in the process. He worked to gain financing for 11 years."

The Ozette dig lasted from 1970 until 1981 and ultimately unearthed around 55,000 artefacts from six beachside cedar houses covered by the slide. The Makah, like many indigenous groups, have a strong oral tradition, with much of their history passed down through storytelling, song and dance. The evidence unearthed at Ozette affirmed these stories and added important details.

"It was a spectacular place to excavate; the preservation and richness was extraordinary," recalled archaeologist Gary Wessen, a former field director at the site who later wrote a PhD dissertation on the topic. "Ozette is what we call a primary deposition. We have all these materials preserved in the places where they were actually used. It helps tell us more about the social and spatial relationship of the people who lived in the houses."

It was a spectacular place to excavate; the preservation and richness was extraordinary

While much of the material dated from around 1700, some of it was significantly older. Indeed, archaeologists ultimately determined that multiple mudslides had hit Ozette over a number of centuries. Beneath one of the houses, another layer of well-preserved material dated back 800 years. The oldest finds so far have been radiocarbon-dated to 2,000 years and there are middens in the area that are at least 4,000 years old, according to Wessen.

From the outset, the Ozette dig was different to other excavations. Tribal members worked alongside university students at the site, and, early on, it was decided that the unearthed material would stay on the reservation rather than be spirited off to distant universities or other non-indigenous institutions. In 1979, the tribe opened the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay with a museum to house a "greatest hits" of the collection. The 500 pieces currently on display represent less than 1% of the overall find.

"The tribe was very assertive of their ownership and control of the collection," said Monette. "A lab was developed in Neah Bay. For the museum, we hired Jean Andre, the same exhibit designer as the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. We decided to tell our story seasonally with sections on spring, summer, fall and winter."

The museum includes a reconstruction of a wooden Makah house among hundreds of other artefacts (Credit: Brendan Sainsbury)

The result, which has only recently reopened, is a beautifully curated space. Outside on a verdant lawn, I was welcomed by a reconstruction of a traditional wooden Makah house and two large statues wearing distinctive cedar-bark rain hats. Inside, where I met Monette, the assembled exhibits left no doubt about the tribe's maritime prowess. I saw 13ft whaling harpoons, wooden paddles and seal skin buoys. A large central space was taken up with two red cedar canoes guarded by a giant whale skeleton. We proceeded through a mock-up of a dark wooden Makah house with an opening that looked out over a hyper-realistic diorama of the seashore at Ozette.

I was particularly enamoured by the artistry of many of the carved wooden objects. There was a dorsal fin of a whale studded with hundreds of sea otter teeth, and an unusual figurine of a woman lying prostrate in the act of childbirth. These artefacts, along with ornate seal clubs and delicate combs, testify to a remarkable level of craftsmanship.

"The Makah were skilled woodworkers," said Wessen. "They exhibited levels of sophistication regarding technology that weren't appreciated before."

There are several elements about the Ozette project that make it one of the most important archaeological finds in North America to date. The sheer size of the collection coupled with the scale of the effort to recoup it was unprecedented. Then, there's the calibre of the preservation, which, at times, was almost surreal. Wessen recalled excavators using fire hoses to blast the clay off vegetation entrenched in the mudslide. In the process, they exposed green leafy alder branches to sunlight for the first time in more than 300 years. As the oxygen hit, the leaves would quickly turn black, but for 15 to 20 seconds, workers were treated to a glimpse of a bright green leaf from 1700.

When archaeologists and elders work together, we get a more complete understanding of the past

Tribal elders were integral in helping archaeologists understand the meaning of many of the artefacts and how they were used. In the 1970s, there were still a dozen or so native speakers alive in Neah Bay. The knowledge of these elders perfectly complemented the scientific expertise of the archaeologists. Wessen remembers this sharing of ideas as a powerful experience. "When archaeologists and elders work together, we get a more complete understanding of the past," he said.

The Makah are represented by the motif of a thunderbird perched atop a whale (Credit: Brendan Sainsbury)

Neah Bay today has a population of just more than 1,000 people and an economy based mainly on fishing. After returning to the town from my blustery walk out to Cape Flattery, I sought shelter in a small waterfront joint called Calvin's Crab House and watched as the weather swung capriciously between sun and rain.

Just outside, a small monument marked the site of Fort Núñez Gaona, a colonial outpost established by a Spanish lieutenant called Salvador Fidalgo in 1792 as the first non-native settlement in the north-western US. Although the Spanish only stayed for four months, their presence marked an important historical watershed, the moment in which two cultures intersected and learned to live alongside each other in a new and different world. Uniquely, Ozette offers us a time capsule of Native life before the changes prompted by European contact.

With the weather closing in, I decided against visiting the archaeological site, which is isolated and difficult to reach without a car. Unlike Pompeii, there are no ruins to walk around – although the surrounding beaches are spectacular – as the site was backfilled in 1981. All that remains today is an abandoned ranger station, a small memorial shed and some indigenous petroglyphs carved on rocks.

As to whether there's anything else down there, Wessen speculated there might be, but admitted that there's still more research to be done on the existing artefacts first: "The Ozette collection in its entirety has not come anywhere close to having its full research potential realised," he said.

[reclamationdays]

Haíɫzaqvḷa, The Language of the Heiltsuk

The language of the Heiltsuk has been described as living, an expression of knowledge and insight. To me a language has always been an important filter through which a person's ideas or memes are filtered through. A language can define how people think, feel and act. A language is closely tied to a nations culture and you may even say it is the life blood of a nation. I have never believed in that "stick and stones" phrase. I have chosen to believe in that words can kill. I believe that the words we speak can have a profound impact on the world around us. It is the passing of ideas and philosophies, memes.

It is said that the Heiltsuk language is a northern Wakashan language. It has several dialects, five belonging to the five tribes that form the First Nation. The language and it's dialects is said to be defined by intonation, that even slight intonation changes can change the meaning of whole words. Although there are few fluent speakers the number of second language speakers has been rising with the more nuanced and increased understanding throughout the years, instruction has improved, that it was my relative that lives on reserve has told me. I know that the Heiltsuk language is not the only First Nation language that is being revived, there are other nations doing the same. I'm sure that the First Nation languages in Canada will rebound. It has become clear to me time and again how much the First Nations of Canada value their original languages.

I have heard from multiple people I've met and discussed in the New Westminster DC ISS Resources Room that Indigenous languages are being taught across reserves and other places like classes and online classes. The Indigenous peoples of Canada have far from given up on their original languages and are fighting to recover their language, culture and the memes (or ideas) that come with these things. They have time and again expressed desire and shown the actions they are taking to preserve the past. It is heartwarming to hear this resolve. It makes me want to learn about the Heiltsuk language and better speak my father's language Spanish (which I understand more than speak).

Information retrieved from

http://www.heiltsuknation.ca/about-2/language/

https://languagegeek.com/lgwp/languages/wakashan-languages/hai%C9%ABzaqvl%CC%A3a-heiltsuk-language/

[thebigkelu]

Nootka Indian standing on shore with spear. - Curtis - 1910

The Nootka (nut'-kah), also known as the Nuu-chah-nulth, were North American Indians who lived along the seaward coast of Vancouver Island, Canada, and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.  Along with the Kwakiutl, these two tribes formed the Wakashan language family.