A precious Inuktitut dialect slowly dies in Rigolet

PAUL PIGOTT
Special to Nunatsiaq News

RIGOLET, Labrador — “I’m really sorry about this,” a sad old Inuit man says from the kitchen of his empty house.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say. I told you I don’t understand English.”

George Adams lost his wife two years ago. Since then there’s been almost no one left for him to talk to.

That’s because he speaks Inuktitut. And in Rigolet there are only three speakers left.

It’s a story that’s being told in countless other aboriginal communities: the old people have fewer and fewer people they can speak to in their own tongue.

But in Rigolet, the very existence of a unique dialect of Inuktitut is at stake.

At 53 degrees latitude, Rigolet is the world’s most southerly Inuit community. The people there are likely the descendants of Inuit who once traded with French, Basque and then British sailors on the gulf of St. Lawrence in the 17th century.

On most of Labrador’s south coast, intermarriage resulted in an English-speaking Metis culture. But a few Inuit speakers survived in pockets around Rigolet.

Only English

When all the remaining Inuit were settled in that community, many learned how to speak English. Adams says that’s when the trouble with language began.

“I tried talking to my kids [in Inuktitut],” he says, “but they only talks English. I don’t know why.”

The school system is one culprit, according to Alanna Johns. She’s a University of Toronto linguist who went to Rigolet in 1992 to study the dialect.

At that time she found about a dozen people who spoke a conservative variety of Inuktitut. The Rigolet dialect is closer to its western Arctic roots — linguists believe all Inuktitut dialects originate from somewhere in the western Arctic — than the Inuktitut spoken in Labrador’s other Inuit communities.

Johns also found a dialect on the brink of extinction.

“The normal situation in these things is that you have a bilingual generation of parents who learned English in school or at work,” Johns says. “Their children start learning English at school and fully understand when their parents speak in Inuktitut, but they don’t speak back in it.”

“Sometimes it takes a while before the parents even realize that their children don’t speak Inuktitut, and often by then it’s too late.”

Johns notes that the same thing happens to many of Canada’s non-English-speaking immigrant families when their children grow up in English or French communities.

“Which makes it somewhat sad and alarming in the Rigolet situation,” she says, “because the Inuit didn’t immigrate anywhere, the immigrants came to them.”

Inuktitut laughed at

The attitude those immigrants brought to Labrador created another problem for the language.

Winnie Michelin is also one of the last speakers of the Rigolet dialect.

None of her children speak it, she says, “because people used to laugh at us when we spoke our own language.

“Our kids went to school and the people laughed at them because they were talking Inuktitut. It would make you feel bad, but I was married to a person who doesn’t speak Inuktitut and figgered it’s just as well to join them. That’s the way I took it.”

Johns says that many of Canada’s Inuit welcomed English into their communities and schools.

“Parents were probably very happy to see their children learning a language which was going to make their lives possibly a little better economically,” Johns says. “But people also never anticipated the loss of the language.”

The Labrador Inuit Association (LIA) introduced Inuktitut into the Rigolet school for the first time in the late 1970s. Unfortunately, they brought in a northern dialect curriculum and a teacher who didn’t speak the local tongue.

Johns says that made people feel like they weren’t speaking Inuktitut properly, damaging the dialect even further.

This year the LIA received a federal grant of $20,000 for language preservation. The money will all go towards documenting the Rigolet dialect. The stories and words of the remaining speakers are now being recorded in the hopes that one day the dialect can be revived.

But Michelin is skeptical. “They should have done that years ago and we would have kept it up,” she says.

“When lots of the old people were alive, that’s when they should have started. They’re all gone now. It slipped away on us.”

Still time for revival

Johns says human languages are disappearing at an alarming pace. By some estimates as many as 90 per cent could be lost by the next century. But in places like Rigolet there is still time for a revival, Johns says.

“The thing that struck me about Rigolet is that so many people understand so much of their own language but can’t speak it.”

Adams explains, in Inuktitut, that a lot of younger people understand what he says, but when it comes to responding they just can’t get the words out.

“Some of the people around here talk Inuktitut, short ones you know,” he says.”They talks right good in a little bit of words, just as good as I. ‘Qanuingilanga’ and all that.”

These “passive bilinguals” are the most likely to start speaking again.

But a true revival will take the will of the entire community and Michelin says the negative feelings toward her language remain.

“The young ones don’t want to talk their own language cause somebody else is going to poke fun at you,” she says.

“Some of them is trying. It might get picked up again, but I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s enough people to keep it up.” Rigolet would be the first Inuit community in Labrador to completely lose Inuktitut.

But it’s not alone in having language problems. Bilingual parents in Makkovik, Hopedale and Nain are now mostly over the age of thirty and there are now only a handful of Inuktitut speakers in those communities under the age of 20.

“I was in Nain in 1974 and everyone was talking Inuktitut then, little ones and all,” says Adams. “I hope this don’t happen to them .”