Inuktitut 101

PATRICIA D’SOUZA

Ottawa, Nunavut’s unofficial 27th community, is fast becoming a centre for Inuktitut language studies.

“It is an Inuit community here,” says Janet McGrath, an Inuktitut translator and language instructor. “There is a lot of glass and concrete. It is a big city, but there is a thriving Inuit community here.”

Though she now makes Ottawa her home, McGrath moved from Newfoundland to Taloyoak as a child. She lived in several Nunavut communities with her family, and learned Inuktitut by interacting with elders — going out on the land to build igloos and hunt caribou.

Her natural affinity for languages (she also speaks Cantonese, Mandarin and Russian) helped her easily grasp the complexities of Inuktitut. After graduating from high school in Yellowknife at age 17, she was hired as a translator for the legislative assembly.

In 1981, while living in Cambridge Bay, she began teaching Inuktitut. When she moved from Nunavut to Ottawa eight years ago, she didn’t see any reason to stop.

A three-week course in Ottawa offered by her company, Tamalik & Associates, even caught the attention of a group of Government of Nunavut employees in the department of education.

The $2,300 course was supposed to take place this month, but has been postponed at least until next January because McGrath expects a busy summer and fall.

While it does seem odd that education employees, with all the resources of their department and the territory itself, would look south for Inuktitut training, a spokesperson for the department would not comment.

She said that some staff members were looking into the course, but that “no one is going to Ottawa.”

Course at Carleton

But Nunavut residents aren’t the only ones interested in the Ottawa courses. An Inuktitut course at Carleton University, now in its second year, is attracting some people who might not otherwise have thought of learning the Inuit language.

The Carleton course is mandatory in the university’s Canadian studies program. In addition to learning about Inuit art, aboriginal health and healing, and indigenous politics, students in the program must take a course in an aboriginal language if one is available.

McGrath taught the Inuktitut course last year as a night-school program. It was popular among staff of the various Inuit organizations in Ottawa, she said. In addition, she taught a medical student and a lawyer for the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.

This year, Jeela Palluq of Igloolik will be teaching the program — as a day course. The four-hour-a-week lecture will likely attract a younger group of students as a result.

“They have to have the interest and curiosity, because they can’t go out and use the language,” Palluq said in an interview.

It’s a completely different approach than the one McGrath used to learn Inuktitut. “I learned from elders, primarily when I would go out on the land. It wasn’t through explaining anything in English,” she says.

“I learned as a child, so the struggle of my students is different than mine. With Inuktitut, you sometimes feel like you have to take your brain and turn it inside out. Even with the tongue, you have to learn how to use it to make the guttural sounds,” she says.

“You need to give them a map — an orientation in terms of survival.”

She tries to do that in her three-week immersion course, Palluq will do it to a lesser extent in her weekly lecture.

“Inuktitut is so amazingly uniform in terms of the structure. There is a way to teach people to see the similarities,” she says.

The biggest obstacle to teaching Inuktitut as a second language, both agree, is getting people to let go of their connection to the written word.

“Second-language-learners are paper-oriented,” McGrath says. “In English, the written form is the same. In Inuktitut, because it’s phonetic, the writing will change the way it is learned.”

She says she tries to give students an insight into the spoken word. “I orient them to oral culture. They would be drawn to written words. The written form of Inuktitut was only introduced 100 years ago. So it’s really important for students in the first three weeks to get in touch with oral tradition.”

NS immersion

Second-language instruction isn’t the only type of Inuktitut training going on in Ottawa this summer.

McGrath will be “facilitating” a summer workshop at Nunavut Sivuniksavut, using funding from the Nunavut department of culture, language, elders and youth.

Three Inuktitut speakers — including two unilingual elders — will travel to Ottawa to be part of the immersion program.

They will interact with students and allow for an exchange of ideas and terminology, McGrath says.

“There are so many young people and so few elders,” she says. “This is part of their enrichment — Nunavut history through the stories of elders.”

All three programs are peppered with field trips to the national archives and the national gallery and projects that involve interacting with Inuit, she says. “The goal is not to just go down south and have a shopping holiday. It’s like going to an Inuit community.”