Zoe Armstrong – MET

LANGUAGE AS TECHNOLOGY: SPOKEN LANGUAGE

As a French immersion teacher, the hardest part of my job is getting my students to speak the their second language with one another. Because of this, I was really looking forward to Module 2. One of the things that Boroditsky (June 2017) discusses in her presentation is that some languages have genders. French is one of those languages. Though not quite as important in the oral form, my students are always finding it challenging to know and remember the gender of every noun so they are able to conjugate and form agreement accordingly. Another challenge we face with French is for students who don’t identify with gender. Some resources have come out offering more gender neutral French pronouns but more is needed to be done to bring this extremely gendered language into 2022. Another topic Boroditsky (2011) discusses in her article, How language shapes thought, is that bilinguals change how they see the world based on the language they are speaking. I would love to try an activity with my students where some complete it in French and others in English to see what differences arise.

As I was completing the readings and listening to the videos for this Module, I couldn’t help but think about the many Indigenous languages and dialects that were lost through residential schools. “But many more Indigenous languages are critically endangered – they have only a few hundred or a few dozen speakers who are quite elderly. When those speakers die, the language could die with them.” (Anderson, 2018, p. 280). Boroditsky (2017) discusses the link between language and culture. With so much loss of language, there too is such a loss of culture. So much of the information that Boroditsky (2017) shares from her research centers more around languages that, to some extent, exist in the form of writing. This makes them easier to preserve. Of the 5 Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the section of Language and Culture, only 2 have been fulfilled. (Jewell & Mosby, n.d.) We need to act more quickly on these calls to action to allow for more preservation of these languages and ultimately of Indigenous culture.

References:

Anderson, C. (2018). Essentials of linguistics. McMaster University.

Boroditsky, L. (2011). How language shapes thought. Scientific American, 304(2), 62-65.

Boroditsky, L. (June 2017). [Video]. How the languages we speak shape the way we think.

Jewell, J. & Mosby, I. (n.d.) Calls to action accountability: A 2021 status update on reconciliation. The Yellowhead Institute. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/trc/