language
The attack on woke is an attack on education
May 12, 2025By: Yildiz Subuk, Staff Writer Throughout their federal election campaign, the Conservative party has been promoting an “anti-woke” agenda. It draws similarities to US Republican politics, especially regarding education. They provide no definition of what constitutes “woke” or any real acknowledgement of where the term originates from — instead, the term is prompted as a faceless threat. While the Conservatives lost the election, falling 26 seats behind the Liberals, it is concerning that they are attacking education through divisive rhetoric in the sphere of mainstream politics. The attack on “woke” is an attack on free thinking, as the term itself…
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We Follow the River plunges into language, loss, and love
June 5, 2024By: Petra Chase, Editor-in-Chief Content warning: mentions of military violence. Pictured on the cover of We Follow the River are a young woman and man surrounded by a smoggy jungle of green brush strokes. The man wears a Shan State…
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Commissioner of Indigenous Languages discusses importance of language preservation
March 13, 2024By: Olivia Sherman, News Writer Content warning: mentions of residential schools and anti-Indigenous racism. After Canada’s implementation of the Indigenous Languages Act in 2019, aiming to support the reawakening of Indigenous languages in Canada, the Office Commission for Indigenous Languages…
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Linguistic imperialism is violence
September 10, 2023By: Sude Guvendik, Staff Writer Content warning: mentions of colonialism and generational trauma. The dance of language and power is a historical saga of dominance that’s often sugarcoated with euphemisms. Nowhere in history is this more apparent than when colonialism…
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English is a ridiculous language
June 19, 2023By: Daniel Salcedo Rubio, Features Editor English is an absurd language. There, I said it. For me, it was relatively easy to reach a conversational level, but English has some random pronunciation rules which . . . don’t make sense? …
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Immigrants don’t need to “assimilate”
May 31, 2023By: Michelle Young, Opinions Editor Content warning: mentions of colonialism As far back as I can remember, I pushed down my Spanish. Whenever my mom picked me up from school in first grade and spoke Spanish, I quickly looked around…
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“Tongues” explores the complexities of language
November 1, 2021By: Michelle Young, Copy Editor I’ve always had a complex relationship with language. As a child, I was ashamed of Spanish. I begged my mother to speak in English because that’s what the other parents spoke. When I was forced…
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Isabella Wang: poetry is like being at home
July 19, 2021By: Kelly Chia, Staff Writer Isabella Wang, a third-year SFU student, has made impressive strides in the literary community as the author of two poetry collections: a chapbook titled On Forgetting a Language, published in 2019, and Pebble Swing, her…
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Opinions in Dialogue: Why are pronouns so important?
March 22, 2021by Madeleine Chan, Jacob Mattie, and introduction by Dev Petrovic Incorporating the introduction of personal pronouns on day-to-day occasions has become increasingly normalized. The sharing of pronouns is evident in group introductions, social media bios, and Zoom usernames — the…
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It is not an insult to call people racist when they are being racist
July 26, 2020By: Nicole Magas, Opinions Editor, and Manisha Sharma, Peak Associate On June 17, the leader of the NDP party, Jagmeet Singh, was kicked out of Parliament over not apologizing for calling Alain Therrien, a Quebecois MP, a racist. The underlying reason…
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