Elsevier

Cognitive Development

Volume 22, Issue 3, July–September 2007, Pages 392-399
Cognitive Development

Short report
Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.02.001Get rights and content

Abstract

This brief report details a preliminary investigation into how community-level variability in knowledge of Aboriginal languages relate to “band”-level measures of youth suicide. In Canada, and, more specifically, in the province of British Columbia (BC), Aboriginal youth suicide rates vary substantially from one community to another. The results reported demonstrate that not only did this simple language-use indicator prove to have predictive power over and above that of six other cultural continuity factors identified in previous research, but also that youth suicide rates effectively dropped to zero in those few communities in which at least half the band members reported a conversational knowledge of their own “Native” language.

Section snippets

Youth suicide as a “coalminer's canary” of cultural distress

It has been widely argued that, if they are to thrive, both individual young persons and whole cultural communities must somehow succeed in warranting a sense of continuity, or persistent identity, in a rapidly changing world (Chandler et al., 2003). Nowhere are the costs associated with failures to achieve a proper measure of individual and cultural continuity more apparent than in the identity struggles of young First Nations persons who are required, not only to clear the standard hurdles

Factor analysis

Our indices of language knowledge were first correlated with the previously identified set of six cultural continuity factors. The intercorrelations of all these factors are displayed in Table 1. For the most part, these correlations are moderate, and the language factor seems less strongly correlated with the other factors than these factors are with each other.

A principal components factor analysis was conducted on the six cultural continuity variables reported by Chandler and Lalonde (1998),

Discussion

The data reported above indicate that, at least in the case of BC, those bands in which a majority of members reported a conversational knowledge of an Aboriginal language also experienced low to absent youth suicide rates. By contrast, those bands in which less than half of the members reported conversational knowledge suicide rates were six times greater. Although the newly minted index of Aboriginal language use was found to form a common factor with other previously identified markers of

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mary-Jane Norris for compiling and providing the Statistics Canada data regarding Aboriginal language knowledge. We would like to further thank Jessica Flores and Leigh Koopman for all their assistance. This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship to the first author and a Human Early Learning Project grant to the second and third authors.

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