Originally Published: 2007-01-21

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.

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