Italian Could Vanish in Canada within 15 years
Ambassador Sardo urges the community to take action and save their ancestral language
One of the most pleasant surprises I found, upon my arrival in Canada a year ago, was to hear the sounds of my mother tongue coming from thousands - tens of thousands - of Canadians. Canadians of Italian heritage, mostly children and (less often) grandchildren of those Italians who came to this country in the '50s and '60s looking for a better life and who, thank God, found it here. However, not only Canadian children of Italian parents; also many other people, young and not so young, children of a non-Italian parent, who still took pleasure and pride in understanding and using the Italian language, a precious trait of human richness within the diverse, extraordinary cultural mosaic that distinguishes and ennobles this country.
After working a year in Ottawa and visiting almost every province of Canada, I've come to the sad conclusion that of all this, in 10-15 years at most, nothing will remain. Already, third-generation Italian-Canadians do not learn Italian at home, because their families do not know it or feel no interest in teaching it to their children. A few kids still manage to hear it spoken in school, provided they live in areas with high concentrations of Italian immigration, such as Toronto, and they will certainly remember a few sentences on the occasion of Italy's next sports victory. But the fourth generation, just born or underway, will not speak Italian at all, and possibly won't understand it either; and this will be - for the Italian-heritage community, for those Canadians born of a marriage between an Italian and a non-Italian, for Canadian society as a whole - a net loss, a severe impoverishment.
This is due to a kind of cultural sloppiness unworthy of either Italy or Canada. But remedying this is still possible. A few years remain for reacting and re-launching the teaching of Italian throughout the country, first of all within the Italian-heritage community, but not only there. The teaching should begin - unlike in the past - from the earliest years of life, when Italian could naturally and effortlessly join English and French as a third play language in daycares and kindergartens and as a third learning language for several subjects in primary schools. After that, the families and the kids themselves will choose whether they deem it important enough to keep studying it. But by that time, what they already learned will be enough to give them Italian as a mother tongue, never to be forgotten.
For this reason, I've taken the decision to invite the Italian communities - especially couples with young children or who plan to have children over the coming years - to organize a veritable census in their places of residence. Knowing where the kids live is indispensable to verify whether and how they could be grouped to achieve classes of the minimum size that provincial laws dictate for admissibility to grants. In other cases, it might be necessary to ask the parents whether - should those conditions not be met - they would be willing to contribute to the cost of creating new classes or Italian sections in existing classes.
The generosity and management skill of this country offers innumerable examples of organizations and fund raising initiatives in the service of worthy causes: keeping Italian alive, making it grow even, is clearly one such cause. I hope that in every Italian-Canadian community, representative personalities, prominent citizens, and most of all fathers and mothers concerned with their children's future, will step forward to create ad hoc committees, collecting the information required to size the issue and give a first estimate of the cost. The Italian Embassy and Consulates will give every possible organizational and financial support to this endeavour, but this is and must remain a challenge that Italian families must understand and tackle on their own accord.
I trust that the community will respond positively. In some areas, this program will be enacted on time to start dozens of new daycares and kindergartens in the fall of this year, for the 2007- 2008 school year.
I trust that this will happen because the reasons for saving Italian in Canada are important and easily understood. Not just the generic need to preserve our communities' heritage, although this is an essential goal, especially in a country such as this, where the respect for one's cultural roots is regarded as a national patrimony. There are also reasons that concern the mental and cultural preparedness that today is required of anyone operating in a world made of interconnected societies. People might say, there are other languages, in addition to English and French, circulating in Canada and having a value, even a market value.
I respond not as the Ambassador of Italy to Canada, but as an individual of Italian language and culture, aware of my nation's history as well as of the values of other nations that have contributed to shaping today's world. Knowing Italian is important not just to speak with Italians or among Italians, but to speak with oneself and every other person; to master concepts, feelings, ideas that over the past 2,000 years - through Latin and then Italian - took roots and bore fruits in other European languages and cultures, and then spread to this and other continents.
There are Italian words that are the equivalent of the unique, irreplaceable models of painting and sculpture that the whole world adopted from Italy's Renaissance as part of our universal heritage, or of many musical expressions that everybody still calls - very aptly - with Italian names (allegro, adagio, etc.). Italian does not replace other languages, currently more important as means of social and commercial communication. Rather, it is a special richness of the mind, a cultural dimension that shaped the intellectual diversity of what was once called the Western individual, now known as the globalized individual. Depriving children and grandchildren of this richness is akin to a senseless, irresponsible mutilation: not just for Canadians who descend from - possibly remote - Italian ancestors, but for Canadians tout court.
I would also like to mention even more reasons, practical and immediate, to save the knowledge of Italian in Canada, especially evident to families of Italian origin. Learning Italian as a mother tongue between 3 and 5 years of age means opening a gateway to another world that includes Italy - universally recognized as enormously rich in cultural patrimony - but also every other nation of Europe. One can use it to tour the Old World, study at an increasingly international level, take job opportunities with corporations and professionals in a continent that is one of the world's economic powerhouses and keeps infusing its values in this globalized world.
A child who learns the fundamentals of Italian will grow up into a student who will become fluent after a brief stay in Europe, and who will become more - not less - Canadian, given that the richness of this country is its ability to absorb and merge different cultures. That child will surely be a better citizen of the world, much like in past centuries rulers, nobility and people of letters of every European nation regarded Italian as the language of most sophisticated dialogue and the most adequate expression of a beautiful mind.
I realize that this letter has run much longer than those normally addressed to an editor. I hope you and your readers will certainly understand that what prompted me to write is a disinterested concern, devoid of rhetoric. My appeal is heartfelt and urgent, because it regards the well-being and the image of the many Italian-Canadians who contributed to Canada's status as a leading nation; being Italian, I can't but look at this with participation and pride.
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