Canada is known for it’s multiculturalism, but among second and third generation families of immigrant backgrounds, many say there seems to be a struggle to keep the culture and specifically, the language, of their family’s country of origin alive.
Cristina Valdez is a first generation Canadian. She immigrated from the Dominican Republic with her parents when she was three years old.
“Most people when they first meet me or when they hear me speaking Spanish and they look, they get so shocked, one because I’m an Afro-Latina and two, they’re like, but you don’t have an accent, where did you learn Spanish?”
Valdez’s fluency is thanks to her mother who made Spanish a priority in the home.
But now, as a mom herself, Valdez wants her five-year-old daughter Keylin to have the same experience to keep their mother tongue alive, though there are fears that language and culture could be lost through the generations.
“Sometimes I talk to Keylin in Spanish and she’ll respond in English so she’ll understand everything but respond in English.”
According to Statistic Canada, between 2016 and 2021, roughly 6.3 million immigrants had a mother tongue that wasn’t French or English. But, with second-generation Canadians, that number dropped to 1.2 million. By the third generation, the number was reduced even further to 250,000.
Dan Berges is the Managing Director of the Berges Institute, an online Spanish language school for adults.
He said he’s been noticing an influx of people of Latin American heritage looking to learn the language as a way to connect with their culture and reclaim their heritage. But he said a sense of embarrassment at times gets in the way.
“That shame is an important factor in languages disappearing through generations. A lot of the time it’s the community itself that puts pressure on the kids to speak the native language but it’s not, it’s their second language. And a lot of them grow tired of that criticism”
In Toronto, in 2021, just over 42 per cent of city residents had a mother tongue other than English or French.
Of that, 25.9 percent of people regularly spoke a language other than Canada’s official languages at home. But those numbers appear to be decreasing among some of Toronto’s most spoken languages, like Cantonese, which according to city stats has decreased by 10 per cent.
“In Canada, we have the benefit of living in a context that’s already developed as a form of official bilingualism so, unlike a lot of western countries, Canada has successfully moved beyond the idea of one nation, one language which has really been the DNA of western society,” said Assistant Professor of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, Dr. Amil Kalan. “So I think that’s a really great foundation, but that’s not enough.”
“You have the diaspora languages and those languages will die in Canada and it’s pretty sad for their grandparents who will see how the kids will no longer speak their language anymore,” he added.
And for families like Valdez’s, while supports to preserve multilingualism would be helpful, she said it’s also about maintaining the fabric that make Canada a special place to live.
“To preserve, to generationally preserve our culture, I think that’s really important for my children to know where we came from,” said Valdez.
Expert argue that government incentives through grants in the arts is one way multilingualism can be preserved.
