Abstract
This chapter presents the efforts of two Dene Sųłiné communities in Northern Saskatchewan and their respective schools to keep the aboriginal language vital in the face of growing bilingualism between Dene and English. The Dene transitional immersion program is introduced, as well as community reactions to its implementation at school. The changing language ecologies of the communities and especially the young generation are discussed, mentioning youth language and code-mixing as part of current language choice.
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Notes
- 1.
Updated reports by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are published at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (www.nctr.ca).
- 2.
DESLAS is conducted collaboratively with CRDS, under the guidance of the Dene Language and Culture Committee. It is part of a larger research project ‘Acquisition devices in maximally diverse languages: min(d)ing the ambient language (ACQDIV)’, based at the University of Zurich (http://www.acqdiv.uzh.ch/en.html) that enlists a collaborative approach to investigate mechanisms of first-language acquisition in ten languages exhibiting maximal diversity in a number of grammatical features. The goal of this study is to learn about the underlying principles of language acquisition that are independent of the structure of a language. The ACQDIV database includes nine further corpora beside Dene Sųłiné that have been chosen for their diverse linguistic traits: Cree, Inuktitut, Chintang, Russian, Turkish, Sesotho, Japanese, Yucatec Mayan, and Indonesian (Moran et al. 2016).
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Jung, D., Klein, M., Stoll, S. (2018). Language Transition(s): School Responses to Recent Changes in Language Choice in a Northern Dene Community (Canada). In: Wigglesworth, G., Simpson, J., Vaughan, J. (eds) Language Practices of Indigenous Children and Youth. Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60120-9_3
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