N. B. natives, educators hail release of dictionary in aboriginal languages (fwd link)

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N. B. natives, educators hail release of dictionary in aboriginal languages

Posted By THE CANADIAN PRESS

The irony has never been lost on Imelda Perley.

The only time she would usually hear fluent Maliseet, the language with which
she grew up on New Brunswick's Tobique reserve, was during funerals.

"It's almost as if it was a sign from the ancestors that if this is the only
place that we're going to be using our language and people are dying, then our
language is also dying,'' says Perley, who along with her husband David,
teaches at the Mi'kmaq-Maliseet Institute at the University of New Brunswick.

Perley estimates that less than two per cent of the 5,000 Passamaquoddy-Maliseet
people living in a handful of communities in New Brunswick, Maine and Quebec are
fluent in their native tongue.

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