Cree language

This podcast was recorded on the ancestral lands on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and the Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

This is Humans on Rights, a podcast advocating for the education of human rights.

Here's your host, Stuart Murray.

What happens to human rights when a person's language, the language through which they understand family, culture, history, and identity is taken away? My guest today is Dr.

Lorena Seekwan-Fontaine.

She is Cree and Anishinaabe, is a member of Sagin First Nation here in Manitoba, and is professor and head of department of the Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba.

She is also a lawyer and that combination, the legal training and the lived inheritance of the residential school system has produced some of the most important work in this country on what she calls linguicide, the deliberate killing of a language and what Canada owes in return.

Her book, Living Language Rights, Constitutional Pathways to Indigenous Language Education came out last year.

Michif is a mixed language spoken in Canada, mostly by Métis people.

It combines Cree verbs with French nouns.

Not a creole, not a pidgin, a genuine mixed language where two grammatical systems are fused into one.

The verbs come from Cree, the nouns from French.

It's one of the clearest examples of languages merging rather than forking.

So the continuum isn't one directional.

The similarities aren't simply a collection of words that happen to resemble one another, they occur in systematic patterns across the vocabulary and grammatical system.

Or if we take the Algonquian languages of North America, languages such as Cree, Ojibwe and Blackfoot are geographically separated and have undergone considerable independent development.

but historical linguists have identified regular sound correspondences between their inherited vocabularies.

These correspondences allow scholars to reconstruct forms in Proto-Algonquian, a language believed to have been spoken many centuries ago, of which we have no surviving evidence.