“Everyone is very much aware that we’re losing our language very quickly,” Lori Idlout, the federal member of Parliament for Nunavut and NDP representative, said of Inuktitut in a recent interview. Depending on the language, some communities say they only have a limited number of speakers left, while others caution those who did grow up speaking an Indigenous language are aging. There have long been concerns about the fragility of Indigenous languages. In 2019, it passed legislation that it said would assist with revitalization. Wednesday’s census release on language comes as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has described promoting and preserving Indigenous languages as a priority. The agency says it made adjustments in order to track overall trends. Statistics Canada says because of difficulties in collecting census data on First Nations and other Indigenous communities, some caution should be exercised in comparing census years. Of the different age categories, it was the only one to show an overall increase. The agency also reports, however, that between 20, the number of generation Alpha members - children aged eight or younger - who can speak an Indigenous language grew from 11,715 to 28,755. Statistics Canada released data from the 2021 census that shows about 243,000 people reported being able to speak an Indigenous language, which is a decline from the 2016 census when that figure was around 251,000.
The number of people who speak an Indigenous language has fallen overall in Canada, but the figure grew for the country’s youngest generation, new census data suggests. Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows Tourism Guide.