Inuktitut purity 'has its limits,' expert warns

The details of Nunavut's draft language laws will be settled in the legislative assembly, but the fate of the Inuit language rests in the schools.

This is worth keeping in mind as the language law debates heat up, says Louis-Jacques Dorais, a linguist at Université Laval who has studied Inuit languages across the Arctic for many years.

After all, it doesn't matter to ordinary Nunavut residents whether bureaucrats make PowerPoint presentations to one another in English, Inuktitut or Japanese. Nor does it matter much whether arcane bits of law are translated into Innuinaqtun.

What matters is whether kids speak their native tongue. And, right now, most Nunavut kids learn how to speak and think about most important things in English, Dorais says.

They learn to do this at school, which remains an environment dominated by English past Grade 4, when Inuktitut instruction ends.

Most kids speak some Inuktitut. But in a major study of language use in Nunavut, Dorais found that the Inuit language risks being pushed into the margins of everyday life – for use at ceremonies, such as at church and in the legislative assembly, and to say trivial stuff to parents and elders at home – unless the schools change.

To do this, he says Nunavut needs a lot more Inuit teachers. And it must ensure that these teachers, who are largely trained to teach elementary classes, are able to competently teach high school subjects.

The Government of Nunavut plans to extend Inuktitut instruction to high school by 2019. But it will need at least another 200 Inuit teachers to meet this ambitious goal. Meanwhile, many Inuit teachers are either retiring or taking better-paying jobs with government or Inuit organizations.

But there are other obstacles, which stem from insecurity and a reluctance to accept change, rather than a simple shortage of money.

Elders may scold kids for not speaking Inuktitut "properly." Kids drop the endings of words, and switch to English when it's convenient.

Children, discouraged, may stop speaking to Inuktitut to elders.

Similarly, there is a big emphasis in Nunavut on creating new Inuktitut words where none exist, rather than absorbing borrowed English words into the language. These new words are often lengthy, as they are usually definitions strung into one word.

This attachment to linguistic purity is good to a point, Dorais said, but "it has its limits."

Look across the Davis Strait to Greenland, where the Inuit language is thriving. One-fifth of the Greenlandic vocabulary has roots in Danish.

Nunavut's determination to create new words by committee may overlook how language works. People use whatever words are convenient.

This is why Inuit use English numbers. And that may not be a bad thing. The only unchanging language is a dead one.

The Inuit language spoken in Nunavut in the future may have a lot more English words, Dorais says, yet retain the structure of Inuktitut. In fact, that's how kids speak now.

Another emotional issue that may hinder the health of Inuktitut is the syllabic writing system. There's nothing inherently Inuit about syllabics: they are a variety of shorthand once taught to secretaries, which was used by missionaries to teach writing to Cree, and then to Inuit.

Yet syllabics are part of the Inuit identity in the eastern Arctic. This is perhaps because the Inuit Bible was first printed by missionaries in syllabics.

Syllabics are far more difficult to reproduce on computers than the Roman alphabet. This means it costs more money to print Inuktitut material in Nunavut than elsewhere, such as Greenland. Of course, even Inuinaqtun speakers in the Kitikmeot use the Roman alphabet.

But there are signs that syllabics may slowly fade away. They may be found on official documents and signs in Nunavut, but when Inuit write e-mails, they do so using Roman orthography. They do so because it's easier.

Popular networking websites, such as Bebo.com, are full of pages made by young Inuit. They're written with the Roman alphabet, not syllabics, in a mixture of Inuktitut and English. And this could be the language of Nunavut's future.