Pronounced differences: Restoring Indigenous Place Names

In September 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama declared that Alaska’s Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, would have its traditional name restored. It is Denali again.

We have done a lot of name restoration in Canada. It is Haida Gwaii now, not the Queen Charlotte Islands, and Iqaluit, not Frobisher Bay. While we lose a little history (who was Queen Charlotte, anyway?), we gain a longer, richer one and a name that relates to the place itself. Those places sound like Canada now, just like Toronto, Ontario, or Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

I happened to be in Greenland when Mount McKinley became Denali again, in a charming South Greenland town called Qaqortok. Qaqortok used to be Julianehåb, but many Greenlandic names have been restored. And, since I could hardly pronounce it, Qaqortok got me thinking about naming and renaming.

How do you say Qaqortok? There seem to be three distinct versions. Greenlanders effortlessly put a little click on the qo part in the middle, and they say the t with a sound rather like the Scots use to end the word loch. Danes in Greenland have their own array of speech sounds from Danish and can say something roughly resembling the Greenlandic version. The rest of us, who never developed the right muscles in our tongues, just sound the q’s as k’s — Ka-KOR-tok, more or less. Try harder, and the locals smile to hear us gargling — or strangling.

Three slightly different pronunciations for one name makes a pretty civilized solution. We do similar things in Canada all the time.

We call a certain European country Germany, and the French call it Allemagne, even though the locals call it Deutschland.

Nearer to home, English-speakers pronounce the t in Montreal. French speakers never do, but both names seem accepted.

What do we do with Tsilhqot’in, a name that recently lent itself to an important Supreme Court of Canada decision?

Or Kw’ik-w’iyá:la?
Or Mi’kmaq?

How should we sound out lhqo — or, for that matter, the sound of a comma, or a colon?

Fortunately, the Stó:lo people of the Fraser River Valley have a sensible solution on offer. The word Kw’ik-w’iyá:la is theirs — but they also offer tongue-tied fellow Canadians the option of Coquihalla.

It’s probably a little different from their pronunciation, but most people can say it.

And, indeed, Tsilhqot’in is mostly just the old Chilcotin with a little linguistic sauce applied.

Most Canadians are not linguistic scholars. To capture sounds not used in English or French, linguists deploy diacritical marks — dots, accents, commas, even question marks — when the sounds of the alphabet as known to English-speakers prove insufficient. It’s heroic work, and it may help to save indigenous languages and literatures across the continent.

But most people do not follow that diacritical path. To smother a revived name in diacritical marks doesn’t aid communication or respect. It just silences non-Aboriginal speakers.

The sounds of names that have been restored across the country are a marvel, from Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset, Baffin Island) to Miskeegogamang (formerly Osnaburgh House, Ontario), to the Ogimaa Mikana project in Toronto, which is now posting Anishnaabe alternatives to familiar street names like Davenport and Queen. If I can get my tongue around them, I don’t insist on the old colonial names.

But we may need to put the linguists back in the lab.

Respect and understanding are not going to be fostered by names so weighed down by technical diacritical marks that they are virtually unpronounceable. You say Tsilhqot’in, and I’ll say Chilcotin, and maybe someday we can understand both as respectful attempts to honour the real names of peoples and places.

Christopher Moore comments in every issue of Canada’s History.

This article originally appeared in the December 2015–January2016 issue of Canada’s History.