[LINK] "Linguist documents dying languages still spoken in Toronto"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Verity Stevenson describes how Toronto, as a destination for migrants from around the world, can play a useful role as a place where dying languages can be documented.

[Linguist and director of Queen’s University’s Strathy Language Unit, Anastasia] Riehl began the Alliance in Toronto after her Cornell University grad school colleague, Daniel Kaufman, launched one in New York. After years of documenting languages overseas, she discovered the last fluent speaker of a dying Latvian language, Livonian, lived outside Toronto from a relative vacationing in Argentina in 2011. The woman, Grizelda Kristina, was 101 and ailing.

“That’s when I was like, ‘OK, let’s just say we’re going to do this,’” she said of the day in 2011 which prompted Kaufman to fly to Toronto to interview the woman who died two years later.

Since then, she’s interviewed more than a dozen speakers of eight endangered languages from around the world. She’s working on a short documentary detailing the stories of three speakers. Riehl has cut back on some work obligation to devote more time to the project.

Toronto’s position as one of the most diverse cities in the world — more than 30 per cent of its residents speak a language other than English or French — makes it an “as good if not better” place to document endangered languages.

The city’s website pegs the number of languages and dialects spoken in the city at more than 140, but Riehl estimates there are “dozens” that don’t appear in census figures. Any language becomes endangered, according to the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), when its speakers cease to use it and when it is no longer passed on to the next generation.