Welcome, bienvenue, bienvenido, sumalubong, Oki Piit!
As you enter Airdrie Public Library (APL), you may have noticed the multi-language greeting sign at the self-checkouts.
You also may have noticed the Treaty 7 Indigenous language greetings on the side of our building, which have been there since 2019.
The reason for these multi-lingual displays is that libraries represent the people they serve.
Our facility is situated on the traditional lands of the Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, Stoney Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina people, so greetings in the languages of those people groups is appropriate.
Airdrie continues to grow as a welcoming community where people from all over Canada and the world come to live, work, and play.
In the latest municipal census, it was noted that the top five spoken languages in our community are English, French, Spanish, Tagalog, and Punjabi.
As a public library, it is part of our mission to make literacy accessible to all members of our community. This means signage in multiple languages and providing programming and collections that reflect our city’s diversity.
Just to give you an idea of that diversity, the City’s latest census also noted Urdu, Arabic, German, Russian, Romanian, Hindi, Cantonese, Polish, Portuguese, Korean, Dutch, Farsi, Swahili, and Finnish as languages spoken by people who call Airdrie home.
Our recent Family Literacy Day featured story times in Ukrainian and Spanish, and February will mark the beginning of our Conversation Circle, where patrons whose first language isn’t English can drop in and practice their English in a friendly environment.
Our in-house collection also has fiction and non-fiction, including children’s books, in a variety of languages.
Later this year, we’ll also be offering brochures in French, Punjabi, Spanish, and Tagalog.
With a free library card, patrons also have access to thousands of books, magazines, newspapers, movies, and audiobooks – in dozens of languages.
For more information on APL’s programs and services, visit www.airdriepubliclibrary.ca.
