A professor at Simon Fraser University just gave skateboarders, snowboarders, and surfers a whole new vocabulary — in Anishinaabemowin.
The new magazine, published out of SFU, tackles a question that doesn’t come up in most linguistics departments: how do you actually say “kickflip” in an Indigenous language that predates skateboarding by centuries? The answer, it turns out, is to build the word from scratch — and that’s exactly what this project sets out to do, page by page, board trick by board trick.
Language revitalization work like this is happening across the country, and Metro Vancouver — home to Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territory, plus a university system that’s increasingly investing in Indigenous language programming — is one of the places where it’s landing loudest. Anishinaabemowin isn’t local to the Lower Mainland the way Halkomelem or Squamish are, but the project’s home base at SFU puts it squarely in our backyard, and it’s part of a broader wave of Indigenous-led language work reshaping how, and where, these languages get spoken next.
Why Board Sports?
Skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing all share something with language itself: they’re built on movement, rhythm, and a vocabulary that keeps expanding to describe new tricks as they’re invented. Pairing that with a language actively being revitalized isn’t just cute framing — it’s a genuinely useful proving ground. New words have to describe real, physical, often fast-moving actions, which forces the kind of precise, creative language-building that keeps a language alive rather than preserved behind glass.
It also meets a younger generation where they already are. Board sports culture skews young, online, and visual — exactly the audience that language revitalization efforts have historically struggled to reach through textbooks alone.
What This Means for Vancouver
Vancouver likes to talk about being on unceded territory; projects like this are a reminder of what actually doing something about it can look like, coming out of a local institution. It’s a small, specific example — a magazine, some new words for a kickflip — but it’s the kind of specific that adds up. Expanding a living language into new cultural spaces, on purpose, is exactly the sort of work that turns land acknowledgments into something more than a line read before a meeting.
Know of other language-revitalization projects happening around the city? We want to hear about them. 👀
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