Our children are losing the languages we pray in

Here is the test. Ask a child of ten, born in Calgary to parents born in Accra, Lagos or Addis, to say good morning in their parents' language. They will manage it. Ask them to say that the food is too spicy. Ask them to tell a joke. Ask them what their grandmother says when she is annoyed. You will get English, or nothing.

That is not a failure of the child. It is a language with no rooms left to live in.

The pattern is not mysterious

Linguists have documented this for a century across every immigrant country. The first generation speaks the home language. The second speaks it at home and loses it in public. The third has a handful of words, usually food and endearments, and often a mild grief about it that arrives around the age of thirty.

Canada is not exempt. Statistics Canada's census records speakers of Amharic, Somali, Tigrinya, Yoruba, Swahili, Twi, Igbo, Hausa and dozens of others spread across the country, and records just as clearly that retention falls away with each generation born here. Worldwide, UNESCO's estimate is that at least forty per cent of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken today are at risk of disappearing. Treat the popular line that a language dies every two weeks as a slogan rather than a measurement — but the direction of travel is not in dispute.

Why Sunday school is not enough

Most families respond to this with lessons. A Saturday heritage school, a tutor, a workbook, a determined aunt. The effort is real and we are not mocking it. But it is aimed at the wrong target, because a language is not a subject. It is a set of situations.

Church and greeting give a child one register — the formal one. It is fixed, polite and rehearsed. It is genuinely useful: a person who can pray in a language has a door into it for the rest of their life. But a language that lives only in one register is like owning a house with one room: there is nowhere to put anything new. You cannot negotiate in a liturgical register. You cannot flirt, or complain, or swear, or explain why you are late. And those are precisely the situations a child needs the language in, because that is what being ten, fourteen and seventeen consists of.

The arithmetic nobody wants to look at

Count the hours. A school-age child in Canada is in English for most of the day: classroom, playground, screen, bus, bedtime story. Call it fifty hours a week or more. The heritage language gets whatever is left — a Saturday morning, a conversation at dinner, a phone call to a grandmother on Sunday.

You cannot out-teach a fifty-to-two ratio by adding an hour of instruction. You can only change the ratio. Which means the language has to move out of the lesson and into the house: into the argument about whose turn it is to wash up, into the market, into the joke, into the money.

What actually works

None of this is secret and none of it is expensive.

Fix the language to a person, not a time. One parent, one language is the best-known version, and it works because the child stops negotiating which language to use — that adult is simply the one you speak it with. Consistency beats intensity.

Make the home the stronghold. If the language is the language of the house, the child gets it for free every day. If it is the language of lessons, they will treat it as homework. The second is easier for parents and loses.

Name it as an asset, out loud. Children work out very quickly which parts of themselves are an advantage and which are a liability in the schoolyard. A child who has been told, by someone they respect, that speaking two languages is a skill that employers pay for, keeps it. A child who has absorbed that it is something to be embarrassed about drops it, and thanks you for not making them speak it in front of their friends.

Give it a register you would not use in church. Teach the insults. Teach the joke. Teach the phrase for "that is too expensive." A language that can only be reverent is a language for one hour a week.

Use the grandparents as the curriculum. A weekly video call with a grandmother is a language lesson the child will actually turn up to, because it is also a relationship. Ask her to tell the story, not to test the vocabulary.

Read aloud, badly. A parent reading a picture book in a language they spell imperfectly does more than a perfect audio file, because it makes the language something a person does rather than something a device plays.

Get it in their ears from people their own age. This is the piece parents cannot supply and radio can. Music, drama, phone-in shows, football commentary — the sound of the language at speed, in the mouths of peers, with jokes. It is why stations like Africanpride Radio matter more than their audience figures suggest: they are handing children a register their parents cannot manufacture at the dinner table.

Stop demanding purity. A child who mixes languages mid-sentence is not failing. They have the grammar in their ear and they are using it under pressure. Mixed speech is a stage, not a verdict, and correcting every sentence is the fastest way to end the conversation.

The part that is ours

There is an uncomfortable detail in most of these households, and it is not the child's. Parents switch to English constantly — for speed, for precision, for the sentence they can only finish in one language. It is reasonable. It is also the lesson. A child watching a parent abandon their own language to get something said will conclude, correctly, that the language is optional.

If you want it kept, it has to be the language you use when you are tired, angry, or in a hurry. Which is exactly when it is hardest, and exactly when it counts.

What the country funds, and what it does not

Canada's official languages policy is law, it is funded, and it protects two languages. Heritage languages get community schools, volunteers, and provincial grants that appear and vanish with budget cycles. That is a policy choice, and it is worth saying plainly that it is a poor one. A country that receives engineers, nurses and traders from a hundred language communities and then lets those languages die in two generations is throwing away an asset it paid nothing to acquire.

That argument will not be won this year. The thing you can control is smaller and more immediate: one conversation, tonight, that does not happen in English.

Keep the proverb, then build the reason. A language survives when a child needs it, not when a child is taught it.