Forty Years, One Purpose
What language do you dream in?
Take a moment with that question. Think of the language that carries your innermost feelings, the one that speaks directly to your soul, the one your family used around the kitchen table. Now consider this: of the world's 7,394 known living languages, only 756 have a complete Bible. Nearly 1,300 language groups, representing 99.8 million people, still have no Scripture at all in their heart language. Nearly 40% of the world's languages are considered endangered, and on average, one disappears every two weeks, taking with it memory, history, and knowledge that will never be recovered.
That gap is the reason CanIL exists. It's the same gap behind every story we've told so far.
It's the reason a small community learned to write down a language that had never appeared on a page. It's why Kylie and Matthew Wicker are in Cameroon right now, one working alongside the Sso language community, the other supporting Bible translation for the Iton people. It's why a valley in Colpa, Peru gathered under a sun tarp last fall to hold the complete Quechua Bible for the first time in twenty years. Different people, different languages, different corners of the world, one same purpose running underneath all of it.
Not upstream. Source.
At CanIL's 40th anniversary celebration, Dr. Johnstone Ndunde, Executive Director of SIL Global, described CanIL's role in this work more clearly than we ever have ourselves. Strong translation depends on a strong source, and for forty years, CanIL has been exactly that. Long before any linguist sits with elders in a remote village, they sat in a classroom here first, learning to listen well, to live respectfully inside a community, and to do work that may take a decade before anyone sees the fruit.
"God's gift to the world," Ndunde called it. Not because CanIL's graduates are exceptional linguists alone, but because of what they carry into the field with them. "The work we do not only prepares people for the eternal kingdom," he said. "It helps them live well in the world they are in today."
When words change lives
A few years ago, one of our Master of Arts in Translation of Scriptures students was working on a Bible translation project in a remote village in West Africa. Local volunteers had stepped forward to help check the translation for accuracy, a critical, often unglamorous part of the work. But somewhere in that technical review, something shifted. The words on the page stopped being a checklist and started being alive. Community members began gathering just to hear more.
There was no sermon, no strategy, no plan to build a church. Just Scripture, in the language people actually dream in, doing what it does. The village asked our student to help them start their first church.
Where it started
CanIL began small, a summer program at Trinity Western University in 1985, back when it was still called the Canada Summer Institute of Linguistics. It was a department of Wycliffe Bible Translators, and it existed for a single season each year. By the early 1990s, Fall and Spring semesters had been added, turning a summer program into a full year of pre-field training, and the name changed to match what it had become: the Canada Institute of Linguistics.
The growth didn't stop there. By the late 1990s, enrolment had grown enough that CanIL became TWU's newly formed Linguistics Department, offering a BA in Linguistics and a TESL certificate, with a Master's in Applied Linguistics and Exegesis offered alongside it through ACTS Seminaries. At the time, the entire operation- offices, classrooms, library, computer lab- ran out of a 3,000-square-foot portable building.
In 2000, CanIL incorporated separately from Wycliffe Bible Translators, and in 2003, the CanIL Harvest Centre was built on the TWU campus, a three-storey, 32,000-square-foot home with real classrooms, real computer labs, and space for a program that had long since outgrown a portable building.
What forty years actually looks like
Since 1985, CanIL alumni have gone on to serve language communities in more than 40 countries, doing linguistic research, literacy development, orthography development, language survey, Bible translation, and teaching - work that rarely makes headlines but reshapes the communities it touches. Along the way, CanIL has held onto a founding conviction that a person's ability to serve shouldn't be limited by their finances, offering bursaries, scholarships, and paid work experience so students can pursue this calling without the burden of debt following them into the field.
Revelation 7:9 describes a vision of "every nation, tribe, people and language" gathered together. It's not just poetry. It's the picture CanIL has spent forty years working toward: one language, one community, one translated verse at a time.
We don't know yet whose story we'll be telling ten years from now, which language will finally get its first written word, which village will gather to hear Scripture for the first time. But we know it's coming. For forty years, that's what this place has been built to do. It's the source.
