GN is an English government, Aariak warns

DENISE RIDEOUT

Nunavut government employees are speaking, writing and thinking in English, Nunavut’s language commissioner says, despite the government’s goal to make Inuktitut its working language by 2020.

English is the language of choice for many government tasks, from writing internal memos to conducting meetings, Eva Aariak told the Ajauqtiit committee on Jan 31. The committee is made up of five MLAs and reviews the GN’s progress on meeting its requirements under the land claim agreement.

English dominates the workplace in part because about 55 per cent of government staff are non-Inuit, she says, but also because the GN has no vision for making Inuktitut its everyday language.

In her 2000-1 annual report, released last month, Aariak assesses the GN’s language policies and concludes that the situation is pitiful. “We found the working language of the Nunavut government is almost always English,” Aariak said in her presentation to MLAs — conducted almost entirely in Inuktitut.

In her discussions with the heads of GN departments, Aariak learned that the government is nowhere near the day when its employees will work entirely in Inuktitut. Under the Bathurst Mandate, the GN is committed to making Inuktitut its working language by 2020.

The English workplace

Aariak said the chances of hearing Inuktitut among staff at the middle and senior levels of government are slim. That’s because about 80 per cent of those jobs are filled by non-Inuit. The situation has meant that Inuit in upper management must work in English to be understood by their unilingual co-workers.

Last year, Inuit accounted for only 31 per cent of GN employees in Iqaluit, 47 per cent of those in Rankin Inlet, and 42 per cent in Cambridge Bay, according to the report.

“Inuit employees spend most of their time talking and thinking in English,” Aariak said.

Virtually all internal communications between departments takes place in English. And official government reports and documents are almost always written in English first and translated only if an Inuktitut version is necessary, she said.

The language commissioner said the GN will have to increase its number of Inuit employees if it is serious about meeting its language goals.

A bright spot in an otherwise gloomy picture is the GN’s decentralization plan. Employees working in most of Nunavut’s smaller communities almost always speak Inuktitut in the workplace. Aariak suggests that decentralized offices may be the logical place for the GN to start instituting Inuktitut as the working language.

“A difficult process”

“Changing the working language of the government from English to Inuktitut will be a difficult process,” Aariak cautioned MLAs in her presentation.

“While the government is committed to making Inuktitut the working language by 2020, there is no plan in place to make this happen.”

Members of the Ajauqtiit committee agreed. “It seems like the government doesn’t even know what they were mandated to do,” said James Arvaluk, MLA for Coral Harbour and Chesterfield Inlet. “We will speak Inuktitut sometimes, but it seems we will always run the government in English.”

Aariak urges cabinet ministers to create a working group of senior officials who can devise a language strategy for the GN. The plan would include setting guidelines on the use of Inuktitut in meetings and documents, paying bonuses to encourage employees to learn and use Inuktitut and training Inuit staff to improve their Inuktitut writing skills.

Aariak is also pressuring the GN to improve the state of Inuktitut education in Nunavut’s schools. Currently, students learn Inuktitut only from kindergarten to Grade 4 and are then taught almost entirely in English.

“If we want our young people to work in Inuktitut in 2020, they must be able to speak, read and write their language. In order for this to happen, young Nunavummiut must be taught their language in high schools,” Aariak said.

The Ajauqtiit committee will take the language commissioner’s recommendations to cabinet.