 |
 | This article has multiple issues. Please helpimprove it or discuss these issues on thetalk page.(Learn how and when to remove these messages) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
|
| Inuit | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Alaska,Nunavut,Northwest Territories (Inuvialuit Settlement Region),Quebec (Nunavik),Labrador (Nunatsiavut,Nunatuĸavut),Greenland |
| Ethnicity | Inuit |
Native speakers | est. 100,000 |
| Linguistic classification | Eskaleut
|
| Proto-language | Proto-Inuit |
| Subdivisions |
|
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | inui1246 |
 | |
 Maps of Inuit oral languages (top) andGreenlandic andInuit Sign Languages (bottom) | |
TheInuit languages are a closely related group ofindigenous American languages traditionally spoken across theNorth American Arctic and the adjacent subarctic regions as far south asLabrador. The Inuit languages are one of the two branches of theEskimoan language family, the other being theYupik languages, which are spoken inAlaska and theRussian Far East. MostInuit live in one of three countries:Greenland, a self-governing territory within theKingdom of Denmark; Canada, specifically inNunavut, theInuvialuit Settlement Region of theNorthwest Territories, theNunavik region ofQuebec, and theNunatsiavut andNunatuKavut regions of Labrador; and the United States, specifically in northern and western Alaska.
The total population of Inuit speaking their traditional languages is difficult to assess with precision, since most counts rely on self-reported census data that may not accurately reflect usage or competence. Greenland census estimates place the number of Inuit language speakers there at roughly 50,000.[1] According to the2021 Canadian census, the Inuit population of Canada is 70,540, of which 33,790 report Inuit as their first language.[2] Greenland and Canada account for the bulk of Inuit speakers, although about 7,500 Alaskans speak some variety of an Inuit language out of a total population of over 13,000 Inuit.[3] An estimated 7,000Greenlandic Inuit live in Denmark, the largest group outside of North America. Thus, the total population of Inuit speakers is about 100,000 people.
Although they are from two differentlanguage families, Inuit also speak bothInuit Sign Language (IUR) in Canada andGreenlandic Sign Language in Greenland. It is unknown to academia if the two sign languages are related. It also remains unknown to what extent IUR is spoken acrossInuit Nunangat. Finally, even though IUR is slowly being replaced byAmerican Sign Language, there are efforts to support the native sign language underway.[4]
The traditional language of the Inuit is a system of closely interrelated dialects that are not readily comprehensible from one end of the Inuit world to the other; some people do not think of it as a single language but rather a group of languages. However, there are no clear criteria for breaking the Inuit language into specific member languages since it forms adialect continuum. Each band of Inuit understands its neighbours, and most likely its neighbours' neighbours; but at some remove, comprehensibility drops to a very low level.
As a result, Inuit in different places use different words for its own variants and for the entire group of languages, and this ambiguity has been carried into other languages, creating a great deal of confusion over what labels should be applied to it.
In Greenland the official form of Inuit language, and the official language of the state, is calledKalaallisut. In other languages, it is often calledGreenlandic or somecognate term. The Inuit languages of Alaska are calledInupiatun, but the variants of theSeward Peninsula are distinguished from the other Alaskan variants by calling themQawiaraq, or for some dialects,Bering Strait Inupiatun.
In Canada, the wordInuktitut is routinely used to refer to all Canadian variants of the Inuit traditional language, and it is under that name that it is recognised as one of the official languages ofNunavut and theNorthwest Territories. However, one of the variants of western Nunavut, and the eastern Northwest Territories, is calledInuinnaqtun to distinguish itself from the dialects of eastern Canada, while the variants of the Northwest Territories are sometimes calledInuvialuktun and have in the past sometimes been calledInuktun. In those dialects, the name is sometimes rendered asInuktitun to reflect dialectal differences in pronunciation. The Inuit language ofQuebec is calledInuttitut by its speakers, and often by other people, but this is a minor variation in pronunciation. InLabrador, the language is calledInuttut or, often in official documents, by the more descriptive nameLabradorimiutut[citation needed]. Furthermore, Canadians – both Inuit and non-Inuit – sometimes use the wordInuktitut to refer toall Inuit language variants, including those of Alaska and Greenland.
The phrase"Inuit language" is largely limited to professional discourse, since in each area, there is one or more conventional terms that cover all the local variants; or it is used as a descriptive term in publications where readers can't necessarily be expected to know the locally used words. In Nunavut the government groups all dialects of Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun under the termInuktut.[5]
Although many people refer to the Inuit language asEskimo language, this is a broad term that also includes theYupik languages, and is in addition strongly discouraged in Canada and diminishing in usage elsewhere. See the article onEskimo for more information on this word.
The Inuit languages constitute a branch of theEskimo–Aleut language family. They are closely related to theYupik languages and more remotely toAleut. These other languages are all spoken in westernAlaska, United States, and easternChukotka, Russia. They are not discernibly related to otherindigenous languages of the Americas or northeast Asia, although there have been some unsubstantiated proposals that they are distantly related to theUralic languages of western Siberia and northern Europe, in a proposedUralo-Siberian grouping, or even to theIndo-European languages as part of aNostratic superphylum. Some had previously lumped them in with thePaleosiberian languages, though that is a geographic rather than a linguistic grouping.
Early forms of the Inuit language are believed to have been spoken by theThule people, who migrated east fromBeringia towards theArctic Archipelago, which had been occupied by people of theDorset culture since the beginning of the2nd millennium. By 1300, the Inuit and their language had reached western Greenland, and finally east Greenland roughly at the same time theViking colonies in southern Greenland disappeared. It is generally believed that it was during this centuries-long eastward migration that the Inuit language became distinct from the Yupik languages spoken in Western Alaska and Chukotka.
Until 1902, a possibleenclave of the Dorset, theSadlermiut (in modernInuktitut spellingSallirmiut), existed onSouthampton Island. Almost nothing is known about their language, but the few eyewitness accounts tell of them speaking a "strange dialect". This suggests that they also spoke an Inuit language, but one quite distinct from the forms spoken in Canada today.
The Yupik and Inuit languages are very similar syntactically and morphologically. Their common origin can be seen in a number of cognates:
| English | Central Yupik | Iñupiatun | North Baffin Inuktitut | Kalaallisut |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| person | yuk | iñuk[iɲuk] | inuk (ᐃᓄᒃ) | inuk |
| frost | kaneq | kaniq | kaniq (ᑲᓂᖅ) | kaneq |
| river | kuik | kuuk | kuuk (ᑰᒃ) | kuuk |
| outside | ellami | siḷami[siʎami] | silami (ᓯᓚᒥ) | silami |
The western Alaskan variants retain a large number of features present in proto-Inuit language and in Yup'ik, enough so that they might be classed as Yup'ik languages if they were viewed in isolation from the larger Inuit world.
The Inuit languages are a fairly closely linked set of languages which can be broken up using a number of different criteria. Traditionally, Inuit describe dialect differences by means of place names to describe local idiosyncrasies in language: The dialect ofIgloolik versus the dialect ofIqaluit, for example. However, political and sociological divisions are increasingly the principal criteria for describing different variants of the Inuit languages because of their links to different writing systems, literary traditions, schools, media sources and borrowed vocabulary. This makes any partition of the Inuit language somewhat problematic. This article will use labels that try to synthesise linguistic, sociolinguistic and political considerations in splitting up the Inuit dialect spectrum. This scheme is not the only one used or necessarily one used by Inuit themselves, but its labels do try to reflect the usages most seen in popular and technical literature.
In addition to the territories listed below, some 7,000 Greenlandic speakers are reported to live in mainlandDenmark,[6] and according to the 2001 census roughly 200 self-reported Inuktitut native speakers regularly live in parts ofCanada which are outside traditional Inuit lands.
Of the roughly 13,000 AlaskanIñupiat, as few as 3000 may still be able to speak the Iñupiaq, with most of them over the age of 40.[7] Alaskan Inupiat speak three distinct dialects, which have difficult mutual intelligibility:[8]
The Inuit languages are official in theNorthwest Territories andNunavut (the dominant language in the latter); have a high level of official support inNunavik, a semi-autonomous portion ofQuebec; and are still spoken in some parts ofLabrador. Generally, Canadians refer to all dialects spoken in Canada asInuktitut, but the termsInuvialuktun,Inuinnaqtun, andInuttut (also calledNunatsiavummiutut,Labradorimiutut orInuttitut) have some currency in referring to the variants of specific areas.
Greenland counts approximately 50,000 speakers of the Inuit languages, over 90% of whom speak west Greenlandic dialects at home.
Greenlandic was strongly supported by the Danish Christian mission (conducted by the Danish state church) in Greenland. Several major dictionaries were created, beginning with Poul Egedes'sDictionarium Grönlandico-danico-latinum (1750) and culminating with Samuel Kleinschmidt's (1871)Den grønlandske ordbog ('The Greenlandic Dictionary'), which contained a Greenlandic grammatical system that has formed the basis of modern Greenlandic grammar. Together with the fact that until 1925 Danish was not taught in the public schools, these policies had the consequence that Greenlandic has always and continues to enjoy a very strong position in Greenland, both as a spoken as well as written language.
Eastern Canadian Inuit language variants have fifteenconsonants and threevowels (which can be long or short).
Consonants are arranged with fiveplaces of articulation:bilabial,alveolar,palatal,velar anduvular; and threemanners of articulation: voicelessstops, voicedcontinuants, andnasals, as well as two additional sounds—voicelessfricatives. The Alaskan dialects have an additional manner of articulation, theretroflex, which was present in proto-Inuit language. Retroflexes have disappeared in all the Canadian and Greenlandic dialects. In Natsilingmiutut, thevoiced palatal stop/ɟ/ derives from a former retroflex.
Almost all Inuit language variants have only three basic vowels and make a phonological distinction between short and long forms of all vowels. The only exceptions are at the extreme edges of the Inuit world: parts of Greenland, and in western Alaska.
The Inuit languages, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, have very rich morphological systems in which a succession of differentmorphemes are added to root words (like verb endings in European languages) to indicate things that, in languages like English, would require several words to express. (See also:Agglutinative language andPolysynthetic language) All Inuit words begin with a root morpheme to which other morphemes are suffixed. The language has hundreds of distinct suffixes, in some dialects as many as 700. Fortunately for learners, the language has a highly regular morphology. Although the rules are sometimes very complicated, they do not have exceptions in the sense that English and otherIndo-European languages do.
This system makes words very long, and potentially unique. For example, in centralNunavutInuktitut:
tusaa-
to hear
-tsiaq-
well
-junnaq-
be able to
-nngit-
not
-tualuu-
very much
tusaa- -tsiaq- -junnaq- -nngit- -tualuu- -junga
{to hear} well {be able to} not {very much} 1SG.PRES.IND.NSP
I cannot hear very well.[citation needed]
This sort of word construction is pervasive in the Inuit languages and makes them very unlike English. In one large Canadian corpus – theNunavutHansard – 92% of all words appear only once, in contrast to a small percentage in most English corpora of similar size. This makes the application ofZipf's law quite difficult in the Inuit language. Furthermore, the notion of apart of speech can be somewhat complicated in the Inuit languages. Fully inflected verbs can be interpreted as nouns. The word ilisaijuq can be interpreted as a fully inflected verb: "he studies", but can also be interpreted as a noun: "student". That said, the meaning is probably obvious to a fluent speaker, when put in context.
The morphology and syntax of the Inuit languages vary to some degree between dialects, and the articleInuit grammar describes primarily central Nunavut dialects, but the basic principles will generally apply to all of them and to some degree toYupik languages as well.
Both the names of places and people tend to be highly prosaic when translated.Iqaluit, for example, is simply the plural of the nouniqaluk "fish" ("Arctic char", "salmon" or "trout" depending on dialect[10]).Igloolik (Iglulik) meansplace with houses, a word that could be interpreted as simplytown;Inuvik isplace of people;Baffin Island,Qikiqtaaluk in Inuktitut, translates approximately to "big island".
Common native names in Canada include "Ujarak" (rock), "Nuvuk" (headland), "Nasak" (hat, or hood), "Tupiq" or "Tupeq" in Kalaallisut (tent), and "Qajaq" (kayak). Inuit also use animal names, traditionally believing that by using those names, they took on some of the characteristics of that animal: "Nanuq" or "Nanoq" in Kalaallisut (polar-bear), "Uqalik" or "Ukaleq" in Kalaallisut (Arctic hare), and "Tiriaq" or "Teriaq" in Kalaallisut (mouse) are favourites. In other cases, Inuit are named after dead people or people in traditional tales, by naming them after anatomical traits those people are believed to have had. Examples include "Itigaituk" (has no feet), "Anana" or "Anaana" (mother), "Piujuq" (beautiful) and "Tulimak" (rib). Inuit may have any number of names, given by parents and other community members.
In the 1920s, changes in lifestyle and serious epidemics such astuberculosis made thegovernment of Canada interested in tracking the Inuit of Canada's Arctic. Traditionally Inuit names reflect what is important in Inuit culture: environment, landscape, seascape, family, animals, birds, spirits. However these traditional names were difficult for non-Inuit to parse. Also, the agglutinative nature of Inuit language meant that names seemed long and were difficult for southern bureaucrats and missionaries to pronounce.
Thus, in the 1940s, the Inuit were givendisc numbers, recorded on a special leather ID tag, similar to adog tag. They were required to keep the tag with them always. (Some tags are now so old and worn that the number is polished out.) The numbers were assigned with a letter prefix that indicated location (E = east), community, and then the order in which the census-taker saw the individual. In some ways this state renaming was abetted by the churches and missionaries, who viewed the traditional names and their calls to power as related toshamanism andpaganism.
They encouraged people to take Christian names. So a young woman who was known to her relatives as "Lutaaq, Pilitaq, Palluq, or Inusiq" and had been baptised as "Annie" was under this system to becomeAnnie E7-121.[11] People adopted the number-names, their family members' numbers, etc., and learned all the region codes (like knowing a telephone area code).
Until Inuit began studying in the south, many did not know that numbers were not normal parts of Christian and English naming systems. Then in 1969, the government started Project Surname,[12] headed byAbe Okpik, to replace number-names withpatrilineal "family surnames".
A popular belief exists that the Inuit have an unusually large number of words forsnow. This is not accurate, and results from a misunderstanding of the nature of polysynthetic languages. In fact, the Inuit have only a few base roots for snow: 'qanniq-' ('qanik-' in some dialects), which is used most often like the verbto snow, and 'aput', which meanssnow as a substance. Parts of speech work very differently in the Inuit language than in English, so these definitions are somewhat misleading.
The Inuit languages can form very long words by adding more and more descriptive affixes to words. Those affixes may modify the syntactic and semantic properties of the base word, or may add qualifiers to it in much the same way that English uses adjectives or prepositional phrases to qualify nouns (e.g. "falling snow", "blowing snow", "snow on the ground", "snow drift", etc.)
The "fact" that there are many Inuit words for snow has been put forward so often that it has become ajournalistic cliché.[13]
The Inuit use abase-20 counting system.
Because the Inuit languages are spread over such a large area, divided between different nations and political units and originally reached by Europeans of different origins at different times, there is no uniform way of writing the Inuit language.
Currently there are six "standard" ways to write the languages:
Though all except the syllabics use a Latin-based script, the alphabets differ in use of diacritics, non-Latin letters, etc. Most Inuktitut inNunavut andNunavik is written using a script calledInuktitut syllabics, based onCanadian Aboriginal syllabics. The western part of Nunavut and theNorthwest Territories use aLatin-script alphabet usually identified asInuinnaqtun. InAlaska, another Latin alphabet is used, with some characters using diacritics.Nunatsiavut uses an alphabet devised with German-speakingMoravian missionaries, which includes the letterkra. Greenland's Latin alphabet was originally much like the one used in Nunatsiavut, but underwent a spelling reform in 1973 to bring the orthography in line with changes in pronunciation and better reflect the phonemic inventory of the language.
Inuktitut syllabics, used in Canada, is based onCree syllabics, devised by the missionaryJames Evans based onDevanagari, aBrahmi script. The present form of Canadian Inuktitut syllabics was adopted by theInuit Cultural Institute in Canada in the 1970s.
Though presented in syllabic form, syllabics is not a truesyllabary but anabugida, since syllables starting with the same consonant are written with graphically similar letters.
All of the characters needed for Inuktitut syllabics are available in theUnicode character repertoire, in the blocksUnified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.
The Canadian national organizationInuit Tapiriit Kanatami adopted Inuktut Qaliujaaqpait, a unified orthography for all varieties of Inuktitut, in September 2019. It is based on the Latin alphabet without diacritics.[15][16]
| Culture |  | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Material culture |
| ||||||||
| Homelands |
| ||||||||
| Organisations |
| ||||||||
| Notable people | |||||||||
| Aleut |  | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eskimoan |
| ||||
| See also | |||||
| |||||
| Indigenous | |
|---|---|
| Sign languages | |
| Non-Indigenous | |
.svg)
