It's
the latest effort to stabilize the language, spoken by fewer than
200 people in Canada
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Six
Nations Polytechnic will spend $732,000 to grow the Cayuga
language. (Six Nations Polytechnic)
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Six Nations Polytechnic
(SNP) will train eight Cayuga language speakers to teach others.
That pool of speakers will also create an archive of resources,
and train teachers who will teach the language at the school.
Fewer than 200 people
in Canada still speak Cayuga. With this new program, SNP hopes that
grows.
"This project will
be the most significant effort to stabilize the Cayuga language
that our organization has ever initiated," said Rebecca Jamieson,
SNP president, in a media release.
"This is a critical
opportunity for SNP and the Six Nations community."
The $732,000 is from
an Ontario Trillium Foundation Grow grant. Adult learners will get
as many as 3,600 hours of immersion language programming. It will
also result in at least 500 hours of audio and visual material.
The project stems from
an earlier SNP research study looking at how to preserve and grow
Ogwehoweh languages.
"When it comes to
language revitalization, we recognize that it's important to take
action on several fronts," said Sara General, acting director
of research and development, in the media release.
The first, she said,
is to teach more people the language. The second is to document
current first and second language speakers to create archives future
generations can learn from.
The project launches
in January, the start of the United Nations's International Year
of Indigenous Languages.
This isn't the first
major outreach SNP has made to grow the language.
In 2016, SNP launched
an app that teaches people to speak Cayuga. Last year, it also launched
an
app to teach people Mohawk.
"These languages
are who we are," said Tom Deer, who teaches Mohawk and Cayuga
at SNP. "It's the identity of this land."
Statistics Canada shows
as of 2016, 55 people speak Cayuga as their mother tongue, and 35
cite it as the language most often spoken at home. Seventy say it's
spoken at home as a second language.
In Ontario, about 20
say Cayuga is spoken at home.
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