From the Globe and Mail, January 16, 2008:

For a brief time when he was 6, Chief Robert Joseph's schoolteachers rendered him mute.

If he dared speak Kwak'wala, his only tongue, even to complain of t'sit'saxsisala (sore feet) or t'ixwa ( a cough), the missionaries at St. Michael's Residential School in Alert Bay, B.C., would strike.

And if Mr. Joseph's friends mustered the audacity to ask him yalkawa'mas — did you get hurt? — they risked a smack themselves.

"I certainly saw my share of rulers, straps and cuffs on the ear," Mr. Joseph says in perfect English, the language forced upon him 62 years ago. "You had to pick up English or not communicate at all."

Others students had it worse. One common punishment involved a sewing needle through the tongue.

The last native residential schools closed in 1996, but the silencing of native tongues continues.

Tuesday, Statistics Canada released data showing nearly all of Canada's native languages sliding toward obsolescence as fluent elders die and young aboriginals grow up speaking only English or French.

In new data culled from the 2006 census, 21.5 per cent of aboriginals reported speaking their ancestral tongue fluently, down from 24 per cent in 2001 and 29 per cent in 1996.

Some languages — Haida, Tlingit and Maliseet among them — lost one-third of their mother-tongue speakers over the first half of the 21st century. Others are down to just one fluent speaker.

But there are optimistic storylines tucked within those bleak numbers. Among the country's population of first nations — all aboriginals who are not Inuit or Métis — those who said they can converse in an aboriginal language held steady at 29 per cent between 2001 and 2006. And the number of conversant young aboriginals living on reserves increased 1 per cent.

That reversal, however slight, is due in part to language crusaders working to revitalize dying tongues and even revive dead ones. In small pockets across the country, aboriginal groups are striking up immersion programs, recording fluent elders and uploading phrases to the Web to ensure linguistic posterity.

Here's a link to the full article from the Globe and Mail.