The Inuit languages are a closely related group of
indigenous American languages traditionally spoken across the
North American Arctic
The North American Arctic is composed of the northern polar regions of Alaska (USA), Northern Canada and Greenland. Major bodies of water include the Arctic Ocean, Hudson Bay, the Gulf of Alaska and North Atlantic Ocean. The North American A ...
and adjacent subarctic, reaching farthest south in
Labrador. The related
Yupik languages (spoken in western and southern
Alaska
Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U ...
, as well as in nearby Russia's farthest east, though severely endangered there) are the two main branches of
Eskaleut, a primary language family. The
Inuit
Inuit (; iu, ᐃᓄᐃᑦ 'the people', singular: Inuk, , dual: Inuuk, ) are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territorie ...
live primarily in three countries:
Greenland
Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland ...
(Kingdom of Denmark), Canada (specifically in
Nunavut,
Northwest Territories, the
Nunavik region of
Quebec
Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirte ...
, and the
Nunatsiavut
Nunatsiavut (; iu, italics=no, ᓄᓇᑦᓯᐊᕗᑦ) is an autonomous area claimed by the Inuit in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The settlement area includes territory in Labrador extending to the Quebec border. In 2002, the Labrador Inui ...
and
Nunatuĸavut
NunatuKavut ( iu, italic=no, ᓄᓇᑐᑲᕗᑦ) is an unrecognized Inuit territory in Labrador. The NunatuKavut people (previously called Inuit-Metis or Labrador Metis) are the direct descendants of the Inuit that lived south of the Churchil ...
regions of Labrador), and the United States (specifically the coast of Alaska).
The total population of
Inuit
Inuit (; iu, ᐃᓄᐃᑦ 'the people', singular: Inuk, , dual: Inuuk, ) are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territorie ...
speaking their traditional languages 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 varieties of Inuit languages there at roughly 50,000. As of the
2016 Canadian Census
The 2016 Canadian census was an enumeration of Canadian residents, which counted a population of 35,151,728, a change from its 2011 population of 33,476,688. The census, conducted by Statistics Canada, was Canada's seventh quinquennial census ...
, the
Indigenous population is 1,673,785 or 4.9% and 65,030 (0.2%) are Inuit (Inuk) of which 36,545 report Inuit as their
mother tongue.
These two countries count the bulk of speakers of Inuit language variants, although about 7,500 Alaskans speak varieties of Inuit out of a population of over 13,000 Inuit. An estimated 7,000
Greenlandic Inuit live in Denmark, the largest group outside Greenland, Canada and Alaska. Thus, the global population of speakers of varieties of Inuit is on the order of nearly 100,000 people.
Nomenclature
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; some people do not think of it as a single language but rather a group of languages. However, there are no clear criteria for breaking the Inuit language into specific member languages since it forms a
dialect continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated vari ...
. Each band of Inuit understands its neighbours, and most likely its neighbours' neighbours; but at some remove, comprehensibility drops to a very low level.
As a result, Inuit in different places use different words for its 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 the official language of the state, is called ''Kalaallisut''. In other languages, it is often called ''
Greenlandic'' or some
cognate term. The Inuit languages of Alaska are 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 Strait 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, and the eastern Northwest Territories, 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 dialectal differences in pronunciation. The Inuit language of
Quebec
Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirte ...
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'' 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. In Nunavut the government groups all dialects of Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun under the term ''Inuktut''.
Although many people refer to the Inuit language as ''Eskimo language'', this is a broad term that also includes the
Yupik 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 Inuit languages constitute a branch of the
Eskimo–Aleut language family. They are closely related to the
Yupik languages and more remotely to
Aleut
The Aleuts ( ; russian: Алеуты, Aleuty) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, which are located between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Both the Aleut people and the islands are politically divided between the ...
. These other languages are all spoken in Western
Alaska
Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U ...
and Eastern
Chukotka, Russia. They are not discernibly related to other
indigenous languages of the Americas
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large nu ...
or northeast Asia, although there have been some unsubstantiated proposals that they are distantly related to the
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian ...
western Siberia and northern Europe, in a proposed "
Uralo-Siberian" grouping, or even to the
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...
as part of a
"Nostratic" superphylum. Some had previously lumped them in with the
Paleosiberian languages, though that is a geographic rather than a linguistic grouping.
Early forms of the Inuit language are believed to have been spoken by the
Thule people, who migrated east from
Beringia towards the
Arctic Archipelago, which had been occupied by people of the
Dorset culture since the beginning of the
2nd millennium. By 1300, the Inuit and their language had reached western Greenland, and finally east Greenland roughly at the same time the
Viking colonies in southern Greenland disappeared. It is generally believed that it was during this centuries-long eastward migration that the Inuit language became distinct from the Yupik languages spoken in Western Alaska and Chukotka.
Until 1902, a possible
enclave of the Dorset, the ''
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 Inuit 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:
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
The Inuit languages are a fairly closely linked set of languages 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
Igloolik versus the dialect of
Iqaluit, for example. However, political and sociological divisions are increasingly the principal criteria for describing different variants of the Inuit languages 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
)
, song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast")
, song_type = National and royal anthem
, image_map = EU-Denmark.svg
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark
, establish ...
, and according to the 2001 census roughly 200 self-reported Inuktitut native speakers regularly live in parts of
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...
which are outside traditional Inuit lands.
Alaska
Of the roughly 13,000 Alaskan
Iñupiat, as few as 3000 may still be able to speak the Iñupiaq, with most of them over the age of 40.
Alaskan Inupiat speak three distinct dialects, which have difficult mutual intelligibility:
*Qawiaraq is spoken on the southern side of the
Seward Peninsula and the
Norton Sound area. In the past it was spoken in Chukotka, particularly
Big Diomede island
, image_name = Bigdiomecropped.jpg
, image_caption = Big Diomede seen from its nearest neighbor, Little Diomede
, map_caption =
, locator_map_size =
, nickname =
, location = Bering Strait
, coordinates =
, archipelago =Diomede Isl ...
, 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.
*Inupiatun (North Slope Iñupiaq) is spoken on the
Alaska North Slope
The Alaska North Slope ( Iñupiaq: ''Siḷaliñiq'') is the region of the U.S. state of Alaska located on the northern slope of the Brooks Range along the coast of two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea being on the western sid ...
and in the
Kotzebue Sound area.
*Malimiutun or Malimiut Inupiatun, which are the variants of the Kotzebue Sound area and the northwest of Alaska .
Canada
The Inuit languages are official in the
Northwest Territories and
Nunavut (the dominant language in the latter); have a high level of official support in
Nunavik, a semi-autonomous portion of
Quebec
Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirte ...
; and are still spoken in some parts of
Labrador. Generally, Canadians refer to all dialects spoken in Canada as ''
Inuktitut'', but the terms ''
Inuvialuktun'', ''
Inuinnaqtun'', and ''
Inuttut'' (also called ''Nunatsiavummiutut'' or ''Labradorimiutut'') have some currency in referring to the variants of specific areas.
Western Canadian Inuit
*
Inuvialuktun (from west to east)
**
Uummarmiutun (Canadian
Iñupiaq)
**
Siglitun (Sallirmiutun)
**
Inuinnaqtun
**
Natsilingmiutut
**
Kivallirmiutut (Kivalliq)
**
Aivilingmiutut (Ailivik)
**
Iglulingmiut (Qikiqtaaluk Uannanganii)
Eastern Canadian Inuit
*
Inuktitut
**
Qikiqtaaluk Nigiani
Inuktitut (; , syllabics ; from , "person" + , "like", "in the manner of"), also Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, is one of the principal Inuit languages of Canada. It is spoken in all areas north of the tree line, including parts of the provinces o ...
**
Nunavimmiututut
**
Inuttitut (Nunatsiavummiut)
Greenland
Greenland
Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland ...
counts approximately 50,000 speakers of the Inuit languages, over 90% of whom speak west Greenlandic dialects at home.
*Kalaallisut,
Greenlandic in English, is the standard dialect and official language of Greenland. This standard national language has been taught to all Greenlanders since schools were established, regardless of their native dialect. It reflects almost exclusively the language of western Greenland and has borrowed a great deal of vocabulary from Danish (in contrast the Canadian and Alaskan Inuit languages have tended to borrow from English, French or Russian). It is written using the Latin script. The dialect of the
Upernavik area in northwest Greenland is somewhat different in phonology from the standard dialect.
*Tunumiit oraasiat, the
Tunumiit dialect (or Tunumiisut in Greenlandic, often East Greenlandic in other languages), is the dialect of eastern Greenland. It differs sharply from other Inuit language variants and has roughly 3000 speakers according to Ethnologue.
*
Inuktun (Or Avanersuarmiutut in Greenlandic) 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 1000 speakers according to Ethnologue.
Greenlandic was strongly supported by the Danish Christian mission (conducted by the Danish state church) in Greenland. Several major dictionaries were created, beginning with Poul Egedes's ''Dictionarium Grönlandico-danico-latinum'' (1750) and culminating with Samuel Kleinschmidt's (1871) "Den grønlandske ordbog" (Transl. "The Greenlandic Dictionary"), which contained a Greenlandic grammatical system that has formed the basis of modern Greenlandic grammar. Together with the fact that until 1925 Danish was not taught in the public schools, these policies had the consequence that Greenlandic has always and continues to enjoy a very strong position in Greenland, both as a spoken as well as written language.
Phonology and phonetics
Eastern Canadian Inuit language variants have fifteen
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
s and three
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
s (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 stop 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
The Inuit languages, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, have very rich morphological system, in which a succession of different
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
s are added to root words (like verb endings in European languages) to indicate things that, in languages like English, would require several words to express. (See also:
Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to rem ...
and
Polysynthetic language) All Inuit 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
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...
do.
This system makes words very long, and potentially unique. For example, in central
Nunavut Inuktitut:
:Tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga.
:''I cannot hear very well.''
This long word is composed of a root word ''tusaa-'' "to hear" followed by five suffixes:
:
This sort of word construction is pervasive in the Inuit languages and makes them very unlike English. In one large Canadian corpus – the ''Nunavut
Hansard
''Hansard'' is the traditional name of the transcripts of parliamentary debates in Britain and many Commonwealth countries. It is named after Thomas Curson Hansard (1776–1833), a London printer and publisher, who was the first official prin ...
'' – 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
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are as ...
can be somewhat complicated in the Inuit languages. 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 languages vary to some degree between dialects, and the article ''
Inuit grammar
The Inuit languages, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, exhibit a regular agglutinative and heavily suffixing morphology. The languages are rich in suffixes, making words very long and potentially unique. For example, in Nunavut Inuktitut:
...
'' describes primarily central Nunavut dialects, but the basic principles will generally apply to all of them and to some degree to
Yupik languages as well.
Vocabulary
Toponymy and names
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'' "fish" ("Arctic char", "salmon" or "trout" depending on dialect). ''
Igloolik'' (''Iglulik'') means ''place with houses'', a word that could be interpreted as simply ''town''; ''
Inuvik'' is ''place of people''; ''
Baffin Island'', ''Qikiqtaaluk'' in Inuktitut, translates approximately 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 (mouse) 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), "Anana" or "Anaana" (mother), "Piujuq" (beautiful) and "Tulimak" (rib). Inuit may have any number of names, given by parents and other community members.
Disc numbers and Project Surname
In the 1920s, changes in lifestyle and serious epidemics like
tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, ...
made the
government of Canada
The government of Canada (french: gouvernement du Canada) is the body responsible for the federal administration of Canada. A constitutional monarchy, the Crown is the corporation sole, assuming distinct roles: the executive, as the ''Crown-i ...
interested in tracking the Inuit of Canada's Arctic. Traditionally Inuit names reflect what is important in Inuit culture: environment, landscape, seascape, family, animals, birds, spirits. However these traditional names were difficult for non-Inuit to parse. Also, the agglutinative nature of Inuit language meant that names seemed long and were difficult for southern bureaucrats and missionaries to pronounce.
Thus, in the 1940s, the Inuit were given
disc numbers
Disc numbers, or ujamiit or ujamik in the Inuit language, were used by the Government of Canada in lieu of surnames for Inuit and were similar to dog tags.
Prior to the arrival of European customs, Inuit had no need of family names, and children ...
, recorded on a special leather ID tag, like a
dog tag. They were required to keep the tag with them always. (Some tags are now so old and worn that the number is polished out.) The numbers were assigned with a letter prefix that indicated location (E = east), community, and then the order in which the census-taker saw the individual. In some ways this state renaming was abetted by the churches and missionaries, who viewed the traditional names and their calls to power as related to
shamanism and
paganism.
They encouraged people to take Christian names. So a young woman who was known to her relatives as "Lutaaq, Pilitaq, Palluq, or Inusiq" and had been baptised as "Annie" was under this system to become
Annie E7-121.
People adopted the number-names, their family members' numbers, etc., and learned all the region codes (like knowing a telephone area code).
Until Inuit began studying in the south, many did not know that numbers were not normal parts of Christian and English naming systems. Then in 1969, the government started Project Surname, headed by
Abe Okpik
Abraham "Abe" Okpik, CM (12 January 1928 – 10 July 1997) was an Inuit community leader in Canada. He was instrumental in helping Inuit obtain surnames rather than disc numbers as a form of government identification. He was also the firs ...
, to replace number-names with
patrilineal
Patrilineality, also known as the male line, the spear side or agnatic kinship, is a common kinship system in which an individual's family membership derives from and is recorded through their father's lineage. It generally involves the inheritan ...
"family surnames".
Words for snow
A popular belief exists that the Inuit have an unusually large number of words for
snow
Snow comprises individual ice crystals that grow while suspended in the atmosphere—usually within clouds—and then fall, accumulating on the ground where they undergo further changes.
It consists of frozen crystalline water throughou ...
. 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 languages 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 (e.g. "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 that it has become a
journalistic cliché.
Numbers
The Inuit use a
base-20 counting system.
Writing
Because the Inuit languages are 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.
Currently there are six "standard" ways to write the languages:
# ICI Standard Syllabics (Canada)
# ICI Standard Roman script (Canada)
# Nunatsiavut Roman script (Canada)
# Alaskan
Inupiaq script (USA)
# Greenlandic
Though all except the syllabics use the Latin alphabet, all of them are a bit different from each other.
The Canadian national organization
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami adopted Inuktut Qaliujaaqpait, a unified orthography for all varieties of Inuktitut, in September 2019. It is based on the Latin alphabet without diacritics.
Most Inuktitut in Nunavut and Nunavik is written using a script called
Inuktitut syllabics, based on
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. The western part of Nunavut and the
Northwest Territories use
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
usually identified as
Inuinnaqtun. In
Alaska
Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U ...
, another Latin alphabet is used, with some characters using diacritics.
Nunatsiavut
Nunatsiavut (; iu, italics=no, ᓄᓇᑦᓯᐊᕗᑦ) is an autonomous area claimed by the Inuit in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The settlement area includes territory in Labrador extending to the Quebec border. In 2002, the Labrador Inui ...
uses an alphabet devised by German-speaking
Moravian missionaries, which included the letter
''kra''. Greenland's Latin alphabet was originally much like the one used in Nunatsiavut, but underwent a spelling reform in 1973 to bring the orthography in line with changes in pronunciation and better reflect the phonemic inventory of the language.
Canadian syllabics
Inuktitut syllabics, used in Canada, is based on
Cree syllabics, which was devised by the missionary
James Evans based on
Devanagari
Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...
a
Brahmi script
Brahmi (; ; ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system of ancient South Asia. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such as 'lath' ...
. The present form of Canadian Inuktitut syllabics was adopted by the
Inuit Cultural Institute in Canada in the 1970s. The Inuit in Alaska, the
Inuvialuit,
Inuinnaqtun speakers, and Inuit in
Greenland
Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland ...
and
Labrador use Latin alphabets.
Though presented in syllabic form, syllabics is not a true
syllabary, but an
abugida
An abugida (, from Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel no ...
, since syllables starting with the same consonant are written with graphically similar letters.
All of the characters needed for Inuktitut syllabics are available in the
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
character repertoire, in the blocks
Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.
Further reading
*
See also
*
Duncan Pryde
*
Inuit Sign Language
*
Yupik languages
*
Uralo Siberian
*
Inupiaq language
References
* Alia, Valerie (1994) ''Names, Numbers and Northern policy: Inuit, Project Surname and the Politics of Identity''. Halifax NS: Fernwood Publishing.
* Collis, Dirmid R. F., ed. ''Arctic Languages: An Awakening'' .
* Dorais, Louis-Jacques (2010) ''The Language of the Inuit. Syntax, Semantics, and Society in the Arctic''. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
* Greenhorn, Bet
Project Naming: Always On Our Minds, Library and Archives Canada, Canada
* Mallon, Mic
Inuktitut Linguistics for Technocrats
* Mallon, Mick (1991) ''Introductory Inuktitut'' and ''Introductory Inuktitut Reference Grammar''. and .
* Okpik, Abe. ''Disk Numbers.'' (Okpik received the Order of Canada for his work on Project Surname
Project Naming Website
* Spalding, Alex (1998) ''Inuktitut: A Multi-dialectal Outline Dictionary (with an Aivilingmiutaq base)''. .
* Spalding, Alex (1992) ''Inuktitut: a Grammar of North Baffin Dialects''. .
External links
Dictionaries and lexica
Oqaasileriffik Language database*
Textbook
Webpages
A Brief History of Inuktitut Writing Culture
Unicode support
Code Charts
{{DEFAULTSORT:Inuit Language
Inuit languages,
Eskaleut languages
Inuit01
Inuit01
Inuit01
Languages of Greenland
Inuit culture
Agglutinative languages
Indigenous languages of North America