Audrey Siegl waited 35 years to speak the words of her ancestors. Now the Musqueam First Nations member spends her days going through old texts and audio recordings to help preserve the language before it’s lost forever.

“We don’t have any elders left, there is no option,” said Siegl, 39, who studied the aboriginal language at UBC. “There’s this one little boy … I see him switching back and forth effortlessly between Musqueam and English. He, and the other boys, have the ability to make us completely fluent.”

B.C aboriginals like Siegl are twice as likely to learn their traditional language as a second language than the rest of Canada’s aboriginals, according to a 2011 voluntary national household survey. The survey found a two-per-cent drop in aboriginal languages in Canada between 2006 and 2011, which was mostly related to those who speak the language as their mother tongue.

On the other hand, the interest in aboriginal language is increasing as a second language.

In B.C., for instance, the number of aboriginals who can converse in an aboriginal language dropped by 20 per cent from 2006-2011, with only six per cent – or 15,000 people – able to speak the language in 2011. There was a 36 per cent decline, however, in the number of people who spoke aboriginal as their mother tongue. At the same time, the number of those learning it as a second language rose 10.5 per cent. Read more.

See: The Vancouver Sun

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