Paolo Frascà’s rare Italian dialect “fossilized” in Toronto and found its own community here.

“That is why I speak the dialect probably better than the people in my generation back home in Italy,” said Frascà, 24. “It’s because I moved here when I was 13 years old.”

He speaks a language particular to a small town of about 3,000 people in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. This tongue is closer to Latin than typical Italian because of the region’s late Romanization. Back home, younger generations like his don’t speak Santonofrese — named after the town of Sant’Onofrio —because it is seen as “lowbrow.” He says that thanks to Toronto’s large Italian community, there may be several endangered languages and dialects like his preserved in the city as people continue to speak them with their family.

That’s not always the case, though. Linguist and director of Queen’s University’s Strathy Language Unit, Anastasia Riehl, who started the Endangered Languages Alliance Toronto, has been documenting which of the world’s dying languages are spoken in Toronto, including Frascà’s. Some are spoken by just one or two people in the city or even in the world. Without a community to share it, those people stop speaking their language and absorb the regional language instead.

Riehl began the Alliance in Toronto after her Cornell University grad school colleague, Daniel Kaufman, launched one in New York. After years of documenting languages overseas, she discovered the last fluent speaker of a dying Latvian language, Livonian, lived outside Toronto from a relative vacationing in Argentina in 2011. The woman, Grizelda Kristina, was 101 and ailing.

“That’s when I was like, ‘OK, let’s just say we’re going to do this,’” she said of the day in 2011 which prompted Kaufman to fly to Toronto to interview the woman who died two years later.

Since then, she’s interviewed more than a dozen speakers of eight endangered languages from around the world. She’s working on a short documentary detailing the stories of three speakers. Riehl has cut back on some work obligation to devote more time to the project.

Toronto’s position as one of the most diverse cities in the world — more than 30 per cent of its residents speak a language other than English or French — makes it an “as good if not better” place to document endangered languages.

The city’s website pegs the number of languages and dialects spoken in the city at more than 140, but Riehl estimates there are “dozens” that don’t appear in census figures. Any language becomes endangered, according to the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), when its speakers cease to use it and when it is no longer passed on to the next generation.

“The global context we’re in has definitely impacted [language loss] because people have all these pressures to speak a more dominant language,” Riehl said, explaining that the phenomenon doesn’t appear only in English-speaking countries. “It’s a sad way to think about it, but it’s one of the few things [immigrants] bring with them.”

She says the best way to preserve a language is for children to speak it and use it.

“I’m thinking of these refugees, especially the kids who end up in these new places — it just seems like it’s so much better for them if there can be a way to support them in their native language.”

But the shyness younger immigrant generations, like Frascà’s, experience in speaking their language contrasts with the shame indigenous peoples of North America were forced to bear for years under colonization, said Kaufman.

“The tragedy in New York, I would say, is that you can find almost every language under the sun except the indigenous language of New York itself, which is Lenape,” an Algonquin language, he said, adding that the only place the language is now spoken and taught is in Ontario.

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Riehl interviewed speakers of indigenous languages at the beginning of the project, but says she felt the documentation was already being done by grassroots initiatives.

Bonnie Jane Maracle, who helps run programs that teach the Mohawk language in the Tyendinaga First Nation, believes that what separates the endangered languages of indigenous communities from the rest is nationhood.

“They have a home and a land and a nation to go back to,” she said of immigrants speaking endangered languages outside their home countries. “This is our home, but where do we return to, to re-learn our language?”

Correction – October 2, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated Daniel Kaufman’s given name. As well, the article mistakenly said Anastasia Riehl heard of Grizelda Kristina while vacationing in Argentina which prompted her to fly to Toronto to interview the woman. As well, Riehl has kept her director role at the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University while working on the project.