In spite of growing up around Germans, I don’t actually speak any German. The few words I do know aren’t printable in a family publication, at least. Going by the census data, I suspect a large number of the multitude of people of Ukrainian heritage in this city are the same, given that the recent census data shows a shrinking number of people speaking the language.
This city is certainly proud of its Ukrainian heritage, you can see it in the architecture, cultural events, even the food served at almost every function. But the language itself isn’t used very much. It’s no longer the most commonly spoken non-English language – that’s Tagalog – and it’s clear that while a lot of people know Ukrainian, not a lot of people are speaking it.
That’s pretty much aligned with my own experience as a kid. My mother didn’t know German, and still doesn’t know German. My father did, and spoke German to his mother, but in our house he didn’t speak it very much at all. After all, he wanted my mother to understand him. My grandmother also was mostly in thickly-accented English around her grandchildren for the same reason, we needed to understand her.
It’s clear that it’s the same story among a lot of the families in Yorkton. The heritage isn’t going anywhere, but the language is slowly fading, though hopefully the words people remember aren’t all the rude ones.
Is it important whether or not the language remains a big part of people’s lives? There are good reasons to keep it alive, of course, especially as people want to understand their ancestors. There is going to be a lot of information about the past of the city’s residents that is in Ukrainian, and it would be a shame if the kids of the future couldn’t understand what that information actually was.
That said, it’s difficult to do much business in Ukrainian in the city. No matter where we come from, English is the common thread, it’s very rare to find someone in the city who doesn’t know the language, so it’s going to be the handy language now. And in households like mine, it was the language everyone knew, which lead to the exclusion of everything else. My father could fool a native German speaker into thinking he was their neighbor, but since we spoke English at home, us kids can’t.
While language is part of our heritage, it’s also more important that people understand each other, and in this town English is pretty much how we understand each other. We understand our past through the language of our ancestors, so I hope that any students of history keep up with Ukrainian and there are always some people in town that understand it. And I hope the same about Tagalog, since in the far future the grandchildren of the people immigrating from the Philippines today will want to know more about their grandparents and why they came here, and their great-grandparents who didn’t, and that language will also be important to understanding their history.
