I Lost My Talk

The Mi’kmaq people, one of North America’s First Nations, are indigenous to the Atlantic Provinces and Gaspe Peninsula of Canada. As of 2023, 66,748 Mi’kmaq people reside in the region. Of those, only 9,245 speak Mi’kmaq, according to 2021 census data. The UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages places Mi’kmaq high on its endangered languages list: It is inconsistently in use, though younger generations do still learn to speak it. This vulnerable language is the “talk” of the poem’s speaker that school and government officials forbade in favor of English.

Mi’kmaq differs from English in several key respects. Some common features of Mi’kmaq include free, rather than fixed, word order. While English sentences rely on word order to convey meaning (“The woman saw the moose on the trail there” carries a different meaning than “The moose saw the woman on the trail there”),  Mi’kmaq uses the morphology of verbs to explain subjects and objects.  Furthermore, Mi’kmaq nouns are categorized—not by gender, as in languages like French or Spanish—but as either animate or inanimate, which is closely in line with other Algonquian language traditions. This noun typology affects verb forms as well. While a native speaker of both languages (Mi’kmaq and English) would be able to