Inuit languages

The language of the Inuit people is traditionally spoken across the North American Arctic and to some extent in the subarctic in Labrador. It was also to some degree spoken in far eastern Russia, particularly the Diomede Islands, but is almost certainly extinct in Russia today. The Inuit live primarily in three countries: Greenland (an autonomous province of Denmark), Canada, and the U.S. state of Alaska.

The total population of Inuit speaking their traditional language is difficult to assess with precision, since most counts rely on self-reported census data that may not accurately reflect usage or competence. Greenland census estimates place the number of speakers of Inuit dialects there at roughly 50,000, while Canadian estimates are at roughly 30,000. These two countries count the bulk of speakers of Inuit language variants, as usage in Alaska is increasingly moribund - roughly 3,000 Alaskans speak Inuit dialects out of a population of over 13,000 Inuit - and the language is almost certainly extinct in Russia. In addition, an estimated 7,000 Greenlandic Inuit live in European Denmark, but this is the largest group outside of Canada and Greenland. So, the global population of speakers of Inuit language variants is on the order of 90,000 people.

What is the Inuit language called?

The traditional language of the Inuit is a system of closely interrelated dialects that are not readily comprehensible from one end of the Inuit world to the other, and some people do not think of it as a single language but rather as a group of languages. However, there are no clear criteria for breaking the Inuit language into specific member tongues, since it forms a continuum of close dialects. Each band of Inuit understands its neighbours, and most likely their neighbours' neighbours; but at some remove, comprehensibility drops to a very low level.

As a result, Inuit in different places use different words for their own variants and for the entire group of languages, and this ambiguity has been carried into other languages, creating a great deal of confusion over what labels should be applied to it.

In Greenland the official form of Inuit language, and one of the official languages of the state, is called Kalaallisut. In other languages, it is often called Greenlandic or some cognate term. However, neither the words Kalaallisut nor Greenlandic are generally used to refer to the variants of Canada or Alaska. In Alaska the language is called Inupiatun, but the variants of the Seward Peninsula are distinguished from the other Alaskan variants by calling them Qawiaraq, or for some dialects, Bering Straits Inupiatun.

In Canada, the word Inuktitut is routinely used to refer to all Canadian variants of the Inuit traditional language, and it is under that name that it is recognised as one of the official languages of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. However, one of the variants of western Nunavut is called Inuinnaqtun to distinguish itself from the dialects of eastern Canada, while the variants of the Northwest Territories are sometimes called Inuvialuktun and have in the past sometimes been called Inuktun. In those dialects, the name is sometimes rendered as Inuktitun to reflect dialectical differences in pronunciation. The Inuit language of Quebec is called Inuttitut by its speakers, and often by other people, but this is a minor variation in pronunciation. In Labrador, the language is called Inuttut or, often in official documents, by the more descriptive name Labradorimiutut. Furthermore, Canadians - both Inuit and non-Inuit - sometimes use the word Inuktitut to refer to all of the Inuit language variants, including those of Alaska and Greenland.

The phrase "Inuit language" is largely limited to professional discourse, since in each area, there is one or more conventional terms that cover all the local variants; or it is used as a descriptive term in publications where readers can't necessarily be expected to know the locally used words. But, this means that while you can call the French language French, you cannot call the Inuit language Inuit. Saying "Peter speaks Inuit" is a very strange usage that most people who are familiar with the Inuit language would recognise as suspect, comparable to asserting that Hispanics must speak "Hispanic". The word Inuit is generally reserved for the ethnic group, both from its Inuit language meaning - it refers specifically to a group of people - and in the way the word has been adopted in English.

Although many people refer to the Inuit language as Eskimo language, this is an ambiguous term that can also include Yupik (see Eskimo-Aleut languages), and is in addition strongly discouraged in Canada and diminishing in usage elsewhere. See the article on Eskimo for more information on this word.

Classification and history

The language of the Inuit is an Eskimo-Aleut language. It is fairly closely related to the Yupik languages, and more remotely to the Aleut languages. These cousin languages are all spoken in Western Alaska and Eastern Chukotka, Russia. It is not discernibly related to other North American or northwest Asian indigenous languages, although some have proposed that it is related to Indo-European languages as part of the hypothetical Nostratic superphylum, and there are those who consider it a Paleo-Siberian language, although that is more a geographic than a linguistic grouping.

Early forms of the Inuit language were spoken by the Thule people, who overran the Dorset civilisation, which had previously occupied Arctic America, at the beginning of the second millennium. By 1300, the Inuit and their language had reached western Greenland, and finally east Greenland roughly at the same time the Viking colony in southern Greenland disappeared. It is generally believed that it was during this centuries-long eastwards migration that the Inuit language became distinct from the Yupik languages spoken in Western Alaska and Chukotka.

Until 1902, an enclave of Dorset people or Sadlermiut (in modern Inuktitut spelling Sallirmiut) existed on Southampton Island. Almost nothing is known about their language, but the few eyewitness accounts tell of them speaking a "strange dialect". This suggests that they also spoke an Eskimo-Aleut language, but one quite distinct from the forms spoken in Canada today.

The Yupik and Inuit languages are very similar syntactically and morphologically. Their common origin can be seen in a number of cognates:

English	Central Yupik	Iñupiatun	North Baffin Inuktitut	Kalaallisut
person	yuk	iñuk [iɲuk]	inuk	inuk
frost	kaneq	kaniq	kaniq	kaneq
river	kuik	kuuk	kuuk	kuuk
outside	ellami	siḷami [siʎami]	silami	silami

The western Alaskan variants retain a large number of features present in proto-Inuit language and in Yup'ik, enough so that they might be classed as Yup'ik languages if they were viewed in isolation from the larger Inuit world.

Geographic distribution and variants

Distribution of Inuit language variants across the Arctic.

The Inuit language is a fairly closely linked set of dialects which can be broken up using a number of different criteria. Traditionally, Inuit describe dialect differences by means of place names to describe local idiosyncrasies in language: The dialect of Iglulik versus the dialect of Iqaluit, for example. However, political and sociological divisions are increasingly the principal criteria for describing different variants of the Inuit language because of their links to different writing systems, literary traditions, schools, media sources and borrowed vocabulary. This makes any partition of the Inuit language somewhat problematic. This article will use labels that try to synthesise linguistic, sociolinguistic and political considerations in splitting up the Inuit dialect spectrum. This scheme is not the only one used or necessarily one used by Inuit themselves, but its labels do try to reflect the usages most seen in popular and technical literature.

In addition to the territories listed below, some 7,000 Greenlandic speakers are reported to live in mainland Denmark [1], and according to the 2001 census roughly 200 self-reported Inuktitut native speakers regularly live in parts of Canada which are outside of traditional Inuit lands.

Alaska

See Inupiatun and Qawiaraq for more information.

Of the roughly 13,000 Alaskan Inupiat, as few as 3,000 may still be able to speak Inuit language variants, with most of them over the age of 40. [2] Alaskan Inuit speak at least two fairly distinct dialects:

• Qawiaraq is spoken on the southern side of the Seward Peninsula and the Norton Sound area. It was also in the past spoken in Chukotka, particularly Big Diomede island, but appears to have vanished in Russian areas through assimilation into Yupik, Chukchi and Russian speaking communities. It is radically different in phonology from other Inuit language variants. Some people consider the Bering Strait dialect to be separate from Qawariaq.
• Inupiatun is spoken on the North Slope and in the Kotzebue Sound area. The variants of the Kotzebue Sound area and the northwest of Alaska are sometimes called Malimiutun or Malimiut Inupiatun. However, despite significant differences in phonology, Malimiutun is readily comprehensible to other Alaskan Inupiat. [3]

Canada

See Inuktitut for more information.

The Inuit language is an official language in the Northwest Territories, the official and dominant language of Nunavut, enjoys a high level of official support in Nunavik, a semi-autonomus portion of Quebec, and is still spoken in some parts of Labrador. Generally, Canadians refer to all dialects spoken in Canada as Inuktitut, but the terms Inuvialuktun, Inuinnaqtun, Nunatsiavummiutut, (sometimes called Inuttut or Labradorimiutut) have some currency in referring to the variants of specific areas.

Greenland

See Kalaallisut for more information.

Greenland counts approximately 50,000 speakers of Inuit language variants, of whom over 90% speak west Greenlandic dialects at home.

• Kalaallisut, or in English Greenlandic, is the name given to the standard dialect and official language of Greenland. This standard national language is now taught to all Greenlanders in school, regardless of their native dialect. It reflects almost exclusively the language of western Greenland and has borrowed a great deal of vocabulary from Danish, while Canadian and Alaskan Inuit language variants have tended to take vocabulary from English or sometimes French and Russian. It is written using the Roman alphabet. The dialect of the Upernavik area in northwest Greenland is somewhat different in phonology from the standard dialect.
• Tunumiit oraasiat, (or Tunumiusut in Kalaallisut, often East Greenlandic in other languages), is the dialect of eastern Greenland. It differs sharply from other Inuit language variants and has roughly 3,000 speakers according to Ethnologue.
• Avanersuaq is the dialect of the area around Qaanaaq in northern Greenland. It is sometimes called the Thule dialect or North Greenlandic. This area is the northernmost settlement area of the Inuit and has a relatively small number of speakers. It is reputed to be fairly close to the North Baffin dialect, since a group of migratory Inuit from Baffin Island settled in the area during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It counts under 1,000 speakers according to Ethnologue.

Phonology and Phonetics

See main article Inuit language phonology and phonetics.

Eastern Canadian Inuit language variants have fifteen consonants and three vowels (which can be long or short).

Consonants are arranged with five places of articulation: bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular; and three manners of articulation: voiceless stops, voiced continuants and nasals, as well as two additional sounds — voiceless fricatives. The Alaskan dialects have an additional manner of articulation, the retroflex, which was present in proto-Inuit language. Retroflexes have disappeared in all the Canadian and Greenlandic dialects. In Natsilingmiutut, the voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ derives from a former retroflex.

Almost all Inuit language variants have only three basic vowels and make a phonological distinction between short and long forms of all vowels. The only exceptions are at the extreme edges of the Inuit world - parts of Greenland, and in western Alaska.

Morphology and syntax

See Inuit language morphology and syntax for a more detailed description specific to Nunavut Inuktitut.

The Inuit language, like other Eskimo-Aleut languages, has a very rich morphological system, in which a succession of different morphemes are added to root words (like verb endings in foreign European languages) to indicate things that, in languages like English, would require several words to express. (See also: Agglutinative language and Polysynthetic language) All Inuit language words begin with a root morpheme to which other morphemes are suffixed. The language has hundreds of distinct suffixes, in some dialects as many as 700. Fortunately for learners, the language has a highly regular morphology. Although the rules are sometimes very complicated, they do not have exceptions in the sense that English and other Indo-European languages do.

This system makes words very long, and potentially unique. For example in central Nunavut Inuktitut:

tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga

I can't hear very well.

This long word is composed of a root word tusaa- - to hear - followed by five suffixes:

-tsiaq-	well
-junnaq-	be able to
-nngit-	not
-tualuu-	very much
-junga	1st pers. singular present indicative non-specific

This sort of word construction is pervasive in Inuit language and makes it very unlike English. In one large Canadian corpus - the Nunavut Hansard - 92% of all words appear only once, in contrast to a small percentage in most English corpora of similar size. This makes the application of Zipf's law quite difficult in the Inuit language. Furthermore, the notion of a part of speech can be somewhat complicated in the Inuit language. Fully inflected verbs can be interpreted as nouns. The word ilisaijuq can be interpreted as a fully inflected verb - "he studies" - but can also be interpreted as a noun: "student". That said, the meaning is probably obvious to a fluent speaker, when put in context.

The morphology and syntax of the Inuit language vary to some degree between dialects, and the article Inuit language morphology and syntax describes primarily central Nunavut dialects, but the basic principles will generally apply to all of them and to some degree to Yupik as well.

Vocabulary

Toponymy and Names

Exotic as traditional Inuit names sound, both the names of places and people tend to be highly prosaic when translated. Iqaluit, for example, is simply the plural of the noun iqaluk - "trout". Iglulik simply means place with houses, a word that could be interpreted as simply town; Inuvik is place of people; Baffin Island - Qikiqtaaluk in Inuit language - approximately translates to "big island".

Although practically all Inuit have legal names based on southern naming traditions, at home and among themselves they still use native naming traditions. There too, names tend to consist of highly prosaic words. The Inuit traditionally believed that by adopting the name of a dead person or a class of things, they could take some of their characteristics or powers, and enjoy a part of their identity. (This is why they were always very willing to accept European names - they believed that this made them equal to the Europeans.)

Common native names in Canada include "Ujarak" (rock), "Nuvuk" (headland), "Nasak" (hat, or hood), "Tupiq" or "Tupeq" in Kalaallisut (tent), and "Qajaq" (kayak). Inuit also use animal names, traditionally believing that by using those names, they took on some of the characteristics of that animal: "Nanuq" or "Nanoq" in Kalaallisut (polar-bear), "Uqalik" or "Ukaleq" in Kalaallisut (Arctic hare), and "Tiriaq" or "Teriaq" in Kalaallisut (ermine) are favourites. In other cases, Inuit are named after dead people or people in traditional tales, by naming them after anatomical traits those people are believed to have had. Examples include "Itigaituk" (has no feet), "Usuiituk" (has no penis), and "Tulimak" (rib). Inuit may have any number of names, given by parents and other community members.

Words for snow

See a more thorough discussion at Eskimo words for snow.

A popular belief exists that the Inuit have an unusually large number of words for snow. This is not accurate, and results from a misunderstanding of the nature of polysynthetic languages. In fact, The Inuit have only a few base roots for snow: 'qanniq-' ('qanik-' in some dialects), which is used most often like the verb to snow, and 'aput', which means snow as a substance. Parts of speech work very differently in the Inuit language than in English, so these definitions are somewhat misleading.

The Inuit language can form very long words by adding more and more descriptive affixes to words. Those affixes may modify the syntactic and semantic properties of the base word, or may add qualifiers to it in much the same way that English uses adjectives or prepositional phrases to qualify nouns (eg. "falling snow", "blowing snow", "snow on the ground", "snow drift", etc.)

The "fact" that there are many Inuit words for snow has been put forward so often it is somewhat of a journalistic cliché (as evidenced by a collection of quotes from linguist Mark Liberman).

Writing

Because the Inuit language is spread over such a large area, divided between different nations and political units and originally reached by Europeans of different origins at different times, there is no uniform way of writing the Inuit language. Most Inuktitut in Nunavut and Nunavik is written using a scheme called Inuktitut syllabics, based on Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. The western part of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories use a Roman alphabet scheme usually identified as Inuinnaqtun. In Alaska, another Roman scheme is used. Nunatsiavut uses another variant devised by German-speaking Moravian missionaries, which included the letter kra. Greenland's Roman scheme was originally much like the one used in Nunatsiavut, but has been reformed and modified in recent years.

The Canadian syllabary

See Inuktitut syllabics for more information.

The syllabary used to write Inuktitut (titirausiq nutaaq). The extra characters with the dots represent long vowels; in the Latin transcription, the vowel would be doubled.

The Inuktitut syllabary used in Canada is based on the Cree syllabary devised by the missionary James Evans. The present form of the syllabary for Canadian Inuktitut was adopted by the Inuit Cultural Institute in Canada in the 1970s. The Inuit in Alaska, the Inuvialuit, Inuinnaqtun speakers, and Inuit in Greenland and Labrador use the Roman alphabet, although it has been adapted for their use in different ways.

Though conventionally called a syllabary, the writing system has been classified by some observers as an abugida, since syllables starting with the same consonant have related glyphs rather than unrelated ones.

All of the characters needed for the Inuktitut syllabary are available in the Unicode character repertoire. (See Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics character table.)

See also

• Eskimo-Aleut languages
• Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
• Yupik language

References

• Inuktitut Linguistics for Technocrats, Mick Mallon.
• Introductory Inukitut and Introductory Inuktitut Refernce Grammar, Mick Mallon, 1991. ISBN 0-7717-0230-2 and ISBN 0-7717-0235-3
• Inuktitut: A multi-dialectal outline dictionary (with an Aivilingmiutaq base), Alex Spalding, 1998. ISBN 1-896204-29-5
• Inuktitut: a Grammar of North Baffin Dialects, Alex Spalding, 1992. ISBN 0-920063-43-8
• Arctic Languages: An Awakening, ed: Dirmid R. F. Collis. ISBN 92-3-102661-5 Available in PDF via the UNESCO website.

External links

Dictionaries and lexica

• Inuktitut - English Dictionary
• Nunavut Living Dictionary
• Interactive IñupiaQ Dictionary
• Oqaasileriffik Language database
• Inuktitut Morphology List (PDF)

Webpages

• A Brief History of Inuktitut Writing Culture
• Inuktitut Syllabarium
• Our Language, Our Selves
• Writing in Inuktitut
• Alt.folkore.urban on Eskimo words for snow.