Reclaiming Kwak'wala through co-constructing G̲wa̲nti'lakw's vision ...
This dissertation is a self-study about my attempt to re-claim my heritage language of Kwak’wala. As a critically endangered language, the First Peoples’ Cultural Council Report on the Status of BC First Nations Languages 2014 found that of a population of 7,309 Kwakwa̲ka̲’wakw reporting to the coun...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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University of British Columbia
2015
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0220824 https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0220824 |
| Summary: | This dissertation is a self-study about my attempt to re-claim my heritage language of Kwak’wala. As a critically endangered language, the First Peoples’ Cultural Council Report on the Status of BC First Nations Languages 2014 found that of a population of 7,309 Kwakwa̲ka̲’wakw reporting to the council about numbers of fluent and semi-fluent Kwak’wala speakers, there are only 160 fluent speakers with approximately 497 identified semi-speakers. I have written from a critical Indigenous Studies stance, drawing from compatible fields such as narrative inquiry and auto-ethnography, and second language acquisition (SLA) theories as well as the growing field of identity theory and heritage language learning within SLA. Further, I asked for and received permission from three Kwakwa̲ka̲’wakw First Nations to interview fluent Kwak’wala speakers in response to a sampling of photographs from my paternal grandmother G̲wa̲nti’lakw’s archive. As a teenager and young mother, she took many photos of our relatives who ... |
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