“AUTHENTIC” L2 REVITALIZATION IN KANIEN’KÉHA: THE CASE OF IDIOMS

Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) is an Iroquoian language with fewer than 700 speakers in six communities across Ontario and Quebec (DeCaire 2023). Similarly to most Indigenous languages in Canada, the residential school system led to an abrupt break in its inter-generational transmission in the mid-20th century. Since the 1970s, Kanien’kehá:ka communities have insisted upon the importance of preserving their language, seen as crucial for their identity and culture. This has led to the development of many revitalization projects, the most significant of which are adult immersion programs (Maracle 2002). These stand out by following the strategy of L2 revitalization: create new L2 speakers of child-bearing age, and have them raise L1 children in the language, thereby restoring inter-generational transmission. As articulated by Kanien’kéha teachers themselves, this approach is highly successful, with the key caveat that, to ensure the language survives with minimal influence from English, these L2 speakers must acquire and transmit an “authentic” form of the language (i.e. emulating L1 speech) (Green and Maracle 2018). However, achieving “authenticity” (Hinton and Ahlers 1999) can be challenging, and immersion graduates frequently lack a final layer of proficiency (e.g. L1-like prosody and discourse), hindering communication with L1s. This work investigates this difficulty of acquiring “authentic” Kanien’kéha through a specific case study: idioms (fixed non-compositional expressions, e.g. wa’kerihwahní:rate’ “I confirmed it”, literally “I-idea-hardened-it”). More precisely, I tackle the following issue: what are the implications of idioms for the restoration of Kanien’kéha inter-generational transmission through “authentic” L2 revitalization? To this end, I conducted focus groups with five expert Kanien’kéha language workers, and made the research process as collaborative as possible by letting participants lead the discussion. They arrived at the following conclusions: idioms are crucial for humour and expressive ability, and are thus a central component of the “authentic” Kanien’kéha that must be preserved; but they are semantically opaque and difficult to use in the appropriate contexts for L2 learners, something which can only be remedied by extensive post-immersion exposure to L1 speech. This work contributes to both language revitalization as an academic discipline, as the implications of idioms for revitalization remain under-studied, and the revitalization of Kanien’kéha itself, by clarifying the challenges involved in this issue and suggesting concrete solutions to them. I also hope that this project may constitute another example of the value and feasibility of mobilizing scholarship to serve the interests of collaborating Indigenous communities, following Cameron et al.’s (1992) Empowerment Model.

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