Les langues autochtones du Québec Edited by Jacques Maurais (review)

Abstract

562LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) Les langues autochtones du Québec. Edited by Jacques Maurais. Québec: Gouvernement du Québec, Conseil de la langue française, 1992. Pp. xviii, 455. Paper $39.95 CDN. Reviewed by Sandra Clarke, Memorial University ofNewfoundland This volume claims to be the most comprehensive ever produced on the indigenous languages of Canada. It focuses on the aboriginal languages of Quebec , Canada's largest, and only French-speaking, province. Today, nine of these languages are still spoken in Quebec, representing three different language families: Algonquian (Abenaki, Algonquin, Attikamek, [East] Cree, Micmac, Montagnais, Naskapi); Inuktitut; and Iroquoian (Mohawk; a second Iroquoian language, Huron, disappeared around 1912). Only three languages—Cree, Inuktitut , and Montagnais, all situated in the more remote northern and northeastern areas of the province—appear to have any real chances of survival. In the more populated areas to the south, even such sizable groups as the 10,000 Mohawk of Quebec have for the most part shifted to the majority language. It is appropriate that such a volume has emerged from Quebec, which of Canada's ten provinces appears to have the most clearly articulated and innovative language policies with respect to its native population. Even though the number of persons who use aboriginal languages is in considerable decline here as elsewhere in North America, Quebec has in the past twenty years formally recognized the rights of at least some of its indigenous peoples to education in the mother tongue, as well as to control over their own schools. Of course, while Quebec may seem progressive on this score, there remains considerably more that could be done to assist the survival of the province's indigenous languages, as a number of contributors to this book point out. The volume seems intended primarily for an audience of nonlinguists; it should appeal to all with an interest in the aboriginal peoples and languages of the Americas, although it is of particular value to those who deal with first nations from an administrative or educational perspective. The book contains a wealth of information, including comprehensive overviews of the history and political status ofthe native languages ofQuebec, set within the broader context ofNorth and South American indigenous languages. While much ofthis material may be obtained from a variety of other sources, including census data and inhouse publications, nowhere has it been compiled in so concise and accessible a format. The book contains eight chapters, which fall broadly speaking into three general areas. The first of these (comprising the first five chapters) provides a historical, as well as a present-day, perspective on the numerical and legal status of Quebec's aboriginal languages. It also includes an excellent and very thorough survey by Lynn Drapeau (Ch. 5) of the various linguistic materials —primarily dictionaries, grammars, and pedagogical materials—that have been produced for these languages. In Ch. 1, Jacques Maurais sets the stage with a general overview of the native languages of the Americas and their gradual decline in the post-contact period. This is followed by Louis-Jacques Dorais' survey of the native languages of Quebec, which not only provides a REVIEWS563 historical perspective, but also summarizes census and other questionnaire data to show that, among the 80,000 or so Quebecers of aboriginal descent, only a third or so (the figures are difficult to establish firmly, given incomplete data) actually use the native language as a mother tongue. Ch. 3, by D. Ronán F. Collis, provides valuable, if fairly general, information on Quebec indigenous language use in various social domains (e.g. home, school, religion, the media), collected via a questionnaire administered by several of the volume's contributors . The fourth chapter, by François Trudel, presents details on the policies of the Canadian federal government, as well as the government of Quebec, towards native languages and native language education over the past 150 years—policies which, not surprisingly, have been largely assimilationist, at least prior to the past two decades. The second thematic area of the volume is represented by a single chapter (6). This consists of grammatical sketches of a representative language from each of Quebec's three language families: Mohawk (Marianne Mithun...