Native Montreal centre offers free Inuktitut classes

If you want to learn Inuktitut or improve your mastery of the language or encourage your children’s Inuktitut skills, you can register for free courses at the Native Montreal friendship centre, whose logo, shown here, incorporates a First Nations tent and an Inuit igloo.

The winter semester of an ongoing Montreal program that offers free language courses in Quebec’s various Indigenous languages, including Inuktitut, gets underway in January.

That’s thanks to yet another round of federal funding given to the Montréal Autochtone-Native Montreal friendship centre to revitalize Indigenous languages by offering free language courses to the centre’s members.

The introductory courses are designed to let Indigenous people learn their languages and to help Indigenous people who have limited knowledge of their languages to improve them.

“We also want to provide an opportunity for non-Indigenous people to discover one of the Indigenous languages spoken in Quebec,” Native Montreal’s website says of the courses.

The languages offered include Innu, Mohawk (Kanien’keha,) Cree, Algonquin (Anishnabe, anicinabe,) Atikamekw, Wendat and Inuktitut.

It’s the third year that Native Montreal has offered the courses, the centre’s Indigenous languages co-ordinator, Carole Bérubé-Therrien, told Nunatsiaq News.

All the classes, which get underway in early January, will take place at the Native Montreal centre, 3183 rue St-Jacques, third floor, at the Lionel Groulx metro station.

For students aged 13 and up who want to study Inuktitut, there will be a weekly class from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.on Wednesdays. The classes will take place from Jan. 8 to March 25.

Inuktitut classes for children aged five to nine years will take place on Sundays from noon to 2:30 p.m., including a break, from Jan. 14 to March 25.

The two courses will be taught by Sarah Nayome, originally from Tasiujaq.

“For the moment, we still have spaces available for more adult students who want to learn Inuktitut and we have a lot of room for Inuktitut for kids,” Bérubé-Therrien said.

Priority will be given to Indigenous members of the centre, and if you’re interested you will need to register here by Dec. 21.

Established in 2014, Native Montreal was founded “by Aboriginals for Aboriginals,” its website reads.

The centre, which serves the urban Aboriginal population in the greater Montreal area, offers over a dozen programs and services.