This extensive report covers a large amount of important material. In its preface, Harnum comments on the creation of the office of the Languages Commissioner as a linguistic ombudsperson during the 1990 amendments to the 1984 Official Languages Act. These same amendments gave equal official status to all of the eight named languages, including Indigenous languages.

Harnum identifies linguistic subgroups within each official language (in North Slavey, she comments that “native speakers can identify as many as six or seven sub-groups.” (14)). In addition, at the time of writing Statistics Canada only differentiated between 'Hare’ (Colville Lake region) and 'Slavey,’ but did not report on other dialects or the differences between North and South Slavey. This being said, Harnum pulls from Statistics Canada figures to discuss language shift and its acceleration in Dene languages. The question on “ability to converse” was only added to the census in 1991; this question allowed researchers to track self-reported second language learning.

With regard to literacy, Harnum simply comments on the dearth of good research. She comments that the NWT Literacy Council has been one of the few to do a study of this kind, but it works with a small sample only. Despite this dearth, Statistics Canada has some useful 1991 data that shows that of all Aboriginal people who could read/write in an Indigenous language in the NWT, 5.7% of them could read Slavey, and 3.8% could write Slavey. This data does not capture whether or not people are referring to syllabics or roman orthography.

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Office of the Languages Commissioner of the Northwest Territories [Betty Harnum]. First Annual Report of the Languages Commissioner of the Northwest Territories for the Year 1992-1993. Yellowknife NT, 1993.