Statistics Canada reported in 2021 that Mi’kmaw language speakers have increased by 5.9 per cent in Atlantic Canada since 2016, making Mi’kmaw the most commonly spoken Indigenous language among First Nations people in Atlantic Canada. Of the 3,665 registered members of Elsipogtog First Nation in 2025, Sock figures around 20 per cent are fluent in the language now. But Sock wants to increase the number of fluent speakers and help preserve some of the unique dialects in Elsipogtog.

The 66-year-old has spent countless hours translating Mi’kmaw books and building Mi’kmaw language flash cards and Mi’kmaw language posters, among many other things to revitalize the language. “I would love to see all our children speak Mi’kmaw to each other,” says Sock. But the road to implementing Mi’kmaw language immersion in Elsipogtog has been a hard one. Mi’kmaw had always been an oral language and a formalized written system wasn’t developed until 1875. “Orthographies” are defined as “correct writing” and represent the sound of a language in written symbols. Since 1875, four other orthographies have been created. These differences in writing systems were Sock’s first big hurdle. Many fluent speakers in Elsipogtog were raised with the Pacifique Orthography, which was developed in 1894, but the Francis- Smith Orthography, developed in 1974, is now the official orthography of the Mi’kmaw Nation and easier to use for Sock’s translation work. Around 2002, during a Mi’kmaw immersion class, she found that, because she was using the Francis-Smith system, parents couldn’t support their children, and interest in the immersion program slowly waned. She was later hired to support children learning Mi’kmaw, but it was less intense than immersion and sectioned into a block learning cycle — once students circled back to her block, they had forgotten it all. “I would like to see younger people start learning the language and keep it going,” she says. “They’re the ones that are good with technology, and I find it would be easier to preserve it with all the technologies.”