There's a reason songs outlast textbooks.
You can forget what you read on a page. You don't forget the song you sang at every school assembly for three years. The melody carries the words, and the words carry the meaning, and somewhere along the way the language stops being a lesson and starts being part of who you are.
That's the theory. Here's what it looks like in practice.
Boozhoo Mino-Giizhigad: Hello, It's a Good Day
At Netamisakomik Centre for Education in Netmizaaggamig Nishnaabeg, Northern Ontario, a Grade 3 to 5 classroom had a poster on the wall: a list of Ojibwe greetings. It was a good poster. Students could read it. But reading a word and owning it are different things.
We built a song around those words. Students wrote the verses. The Ojibwe phrases became the anchor of the chorus. By the time we recorded it, they weren't reading the poster anymore. They were singing the language.
Boozhoo Mino-Giizhigad, Hello It's a Good Day, now lives as a finished song that belongs to that school and that community. It will be sung by students who weren't even born when we made it.
Tu Segha Nezų: Clean Water in Dene Yatie
In K'atl'odeeche First Nation in the Northwest Territories, we worked alongside Dene Yatie language teacher Diane Tourangeau to write a song for the school's Drop the Pop initiative. The students already knew the campaign. They just needed a song for it.
Tu Segha Nezų means clean water. It's in the title, it's in the chorus, and it comes out of the mouths of students who are proud of it because they put it there.
That's the thing about writing a song with the people who speak the language rather than for them. The language belongs to them already. We just helped them put it to music.
Why This Works
Songs are social. They're shared. A student who learns an Ojibwe phrase in class might use it once on a quiz. A student who sings that phrase in a song will sing it at home, in the car, in the hallway. The repetition is built into the format.
Songs are also emotional. Language that shows up in something students are proud of, something they made, something that has a beat and a melody, carries a different weight than language on a worksheet.
And songs are permanent. A language resource video or a classroom poster has a lifespan. A song, especially one tied to a community's identity, can outlast everything else.
If your school or language department is exploring ways to use music for language revitalization, we'd be glad to talk about what that might look like for your specific community and language.