The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2006, Síða 21

Vol. 60 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
63
The Status of Icelandic in Canada
by Kristin M. Johannsdottir
Sometime in the beginning of the cen-
tury a young Belgian came to Canada to
search for a better life. He was hired to
work on a farm in the Argyle district and
wanted to get used to the work and learn
the language. After some months or possi-
bly years, when he was already pretty good
in the language, a visitor came to the farm.
The visitor and the farmer held a conversa-
tion in a language the Belgian didn’t know
so after the visitor had left, he asked the
farmer what language it was that they had
been speaking. “Well, that was English”,
answered the farmer. “But, but, what lan-
guage have I then been speaking”, asked
the terrified Belgian. “Well, that’s
Icelandic”, the farmer answered.
Canada is a multicultural country with
hundreds of ethnic groups, and the situa-
tion has often been referred to as the
Canadian mosaic, in which the ethnic
groups join instead of melting into one big
pot. The Canadians have a multicultural
policy which purposefully tries to avoid
assimilation by encouraging ethnic groups
to maintain themselves and develop as dis-
tinct groups, and things have been done to
encourage the groups to increase group
acceptance and tolerance (Berry 1998:86).
There has, though, been some critisism of
this policy, pointing out that it is quite dif-
ficult to have multiculturalism without
multilingualism and since Canadian society
is set in a bilingual framework there seems
to be an inherent contradiciton (Berry
1998:86).
Only two languages in Canada,
English and French, have ultimate legal
protection, which they got with The
Official Languages Act of 1969, an act that
legislated bilingualism in Federal institu-
tions and agencies. Other languages spoken
in the country have the status ‘unofficial’
and their existence is confirmed by Article
38 of the Official Language Act
(Rudnyckyj 1973:29).
Speakers of other languages than
English or French responded harshly to the
Official Language Act, demanding the
same rights for their own language, espe-
cially since maintaining the language is
often seen by the ethnic groups as crucial to
survival as a seperate entity (Kelly 1975:23).
Therefore the ethnic languages are often
spoken in the home and many have made a
conscious effort to insure their children are
reared with some knowledge of how to
read and write their ethnic language. This
strong emphasis on the ethnic language has,
however, often been in conflict with the
dominant language of the country since
many parents encourage their children to
become competent in the dominant lan-
guage, to improve their career chances. For
instance, the Italian migrants in Montreal
battled for their kids’ right to learn English
instead of French, since the parents consid-
ered that a better choice for their children’s
future, since English is a dominant lan-
guage in not only Canada but North
American, even though French is no doubt
dominant in Quebec (Simon 1975:5-6).
The public school system has not com-
pletely reacted to the diversity of the com-
munity and minority groups have had to
struggle to “hold on to their legitimate cul-
tural and social practises” (Jaenen 1975:71).
This is partly due to the fact that even
though anglophones and francophones in
Canada show support for the policy of
multiculturalism, they have been against
the use of public money to support the
teaching of heritage languages. But as many
ethnocultural communities argue, multi-
cultural policy that doesn’t include finan-
cial and institutional support for mulitiple
language promotion is vacuous (Cummins
1998:293-295).
Nevertheless, the federal government
initiated the so-called Cultural Enrichment
program in 1977, providing modest sup-
port to the ethnocultural communities for
the teaching of the ethnic languages. That
support was eliminated in 1990 (Cummins