by Jasmine Budak
Just a few years ago, a federal survey showed that Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit, is in good shape. But some disagree.
In larger centres, like Iqaluit, English is a pervasive force. The health and protection of Inuktitut rests with Nunavut’s young people, who make up more than half the population. But can they learn it before it’s too late?
It’s just after 9 a.m. on a gusty spring Tuesday in Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital. Eelee Higgins’s kindergarten and Grade 1 students bob at her feet like an unsettled pool. If their fingers aren’t in their mouths or playing with their sneakers, they are stretched to the ceiling to answer a question.
“How do you say ‘horse’?” asks Higgins, a veteran Inuktitut teacher with wide spectacles and coarse dark hair that she periodically scoops off her neck. “Qimmirjuaq,” they answer in a singsong mumble.
All day they converse with Higgins and each other almost entirely in Inuktitut, their Inuit language. English is not allowed. They’re far from fluent, but they can name the seasons, count from one to 50, work out math problems and horse around in their native tongue.
A few hours later, Grade 8 students at Inukshuk High School shuffle into Inuktitut class with the purposeful indifference only teenagers can muster. Two teachers sit at a long table sewing together pieces of sealskin as the students get to work on their writing assignments and gab — in English. After some prodding Isabelle Arsenault, a wide-eyed 13-year-old with a broad smile, tries to read aloud from a children’s book written in Inuktitut. She pleads with her friend to read with her and together they mumble a few sentences, having to look up at the alphabet chart on the chalkboard for help. They have no idea what they’re reading.
“Nobody speaks Inuktitut up here anymore except the elders,” blurts Samuel Tilley, a soft-spoken student with an overgrown mop of bottle blonde hair. Tilley was born in Arviat, a small community on Hudson Bay’s west coast where he says his language thrived. He spoke it fluently until he moved to Iqaluit four years ago.
“It makes me sad because sometimes I can’t even speak to my grandparents.” Arsenault adds, “We don’t even speak it in class.” Unlike Higgins’s young students, these teens can barely utter a sentence in Inuktitut. Others have lost the language altogether.
Despite the optimistic results of a 2001 national census touting Inuktitut as one of the healthiest aboriginal languages in the country, many consider it to be in trouble. “You can’t believe anybody that says Inuktitut is safe,” says Mick Mallon, a linguist and long-time Inuktitut instructor based in Iqaluit. “At the moment people talk very blindly about it, but the seeds of decay are right there.”
Seeds like television, a scant pool of Inuktitut teachers and weak protective legislation threaten the transmission of this fragile Inuit language among Nunavut’s predominantly young population. But preserving Inuktitut, the mother tongue of some 18,000 Inuit in Nunavut, is a complex undertaking. The language is in various states of revitalization and decline across a territory where more than half of the population is under 25. If these young people aren’t speaking Inuktitut, its future looks grim.
TODAY, ABOUT 70 PERCENT OF NUNAVUMMIUT(people who live in Nunavut) speak either Inuktitut or its distantly related dialect Inuinnaqtun. Nunavut alone hosts some 50 local dialects, not counting sub-dialects. Until missionaries made their way to the Arctic, Inuktitut was strictly an oral language. The first writing system emerged in Greenland in the mid-1700s when Lutheran missionaries translated the New Testament using the Roman alphabet. Over the next century, much the same happened in Canada’s Arctic, but missionaries also implemented a syllabic system based on secretarial shorthand that was used for earlier Cree writings.
Inuktitut syllabics proliferated in church literature and soon bible translations and other written church teachings spread across the North. By the early 1900s, Inuit from all over were learning and teaching each other how to read and write Inuktitut, some using Roman orthography and others syllabics. Over the years, style and spelling differences emerged in different regions. In 1976, a federally sponsored language commission created a nation-wide standard for both written versions, which still exists today. There is no similar standard for spoken Inuktitut.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Inuktitut faced its first predator. Aboriginal and Inuit children were sent to federally sponsored, church-run residential schools scattered throughout Northern Canada. The schools run by ministers and priests of a handful of denominations hoped to assimilate young aboriginal people into mainstream Canadian culture. Kids were taught English and some schools restricted the use of native languages. Inuktitut use is said to have dipped to dangerous lows, and it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that it began to make a comeback.
Recent statistics paint a rosy portrait of Inuktitut health in Canada. The 2001 Aboriginal Peoples Survey showed that about 90 percent of people 15 and older in the North claim that they could understand or speak Inuktitut. Compared with some 60 other aboriginal languages, it was deemed “one of the strongest.” According to the survey, Inuktitut use is in mild decline at home but its deterioration is sluggish compared to other troubled languages.
These numbers don’t hearten Eva Aariak, Nunavut’s language commissioner. “Inuktitut is eroding,” she says bluntly. “In the larger centres like Rankin Inlet and Iqaluit, just walking along the street you hear English spoken by many younger people, and it is starting to happen in the smaller communities too.”
In Nunavut, where 85 percent of the population is Inuit, native languages have shown a course of deterioration from west to east over the past three decades. Inuinnaqtun, spoken in much of Nunavut’s western region, the Kitikmeot, has deteriorated first and most rapidly, while Inuktitut in the Baffin, the eastern region, remains relatively strong. Millie Kuliktana, executive director for Kitikmeot school operations, is heading up revitalization efforts in her region. She grew up in Kugluktuk speaking English, although it was not her parents’ mother tongue. She witnessed first-hand the decline of Inuinnaqtun, but she’s optimistic that it will recover.
“Kugluktuk was impacted much more (that other communities) by industry. In the 1970s, men learned English to be able to work on the DEW line sites or in the oil and gas industry, so English became an important commodity,” she says. “But the state of Inuinnaqtun in this region is not as bad as people say it is. The creation of Nunavut (in 1999) has really heightened the desire to preserve the language.”
Like the territory itself, Nunavut’s population is distinctively young. More than half its residents are under 25, and women have the highest fertility rate in the country. By the year 2020, the 15-to-65 age group will make up the bulk of the population and a generation of elders carrying the tradition and language will have died.
Inuktitut’s shaky fate lies with this new generation growing up in an age flooded by a seductive Americanized culture that spreads through their televisions. They are told to hold strong their language and the ways of their elders, but also to be successful, go to university and do great things.
“Twenty to 50 years from now, it is the young people of today that will be looking after our societies,” says Aariak. “Unless they learn the language, I don’t know where we’ll be.”
IT’S CIRCLE TIME IN EELEE HIGGINS’S Inuktitut class at Joamie elementary school. It is a morning ritual when students get to wield the highly coveted metre stick and point to a wall display of pictures and numbers for the class to shout out in Inuktitut. You won’t hear so much as a syllable of English in this class, where Inuktitut is the language of instruction until Grade 3. Joamie also offers a pure English stream with the option to take either Inuktitut or French as a second language. But the Inuktitut training offered in Iqaluit is not standard across the territorial school system.
The duration of Inuktitut instruction varies among Nunavut’s two dozen communities. Depending on teacher availability, each school delivers its own schedule of Inuktitut courses, some offering pure streams all through elementary school while others squeak by with a few elementary courses followed by mostly English instruction in junior years. In most communities, Grade 4 is a transition year during which Inuktitut instruction weakens and English is injected into 50 percent of the curriculum. Students may not learn Inuktitut in the classroom again until high school, three or four years later.
Pond Inlet, on the northern tip of Baffin Island, is an exception. The Ulaajuk elementary school offers pure Inuktitut instruction all the way to Grade 6. And until recently, so did the Alookie elementary school in Pangnirtung. “When I go to Pangnirtung, it feels so good to hear little kids and teenagers speaking their own language,” says Higgins, who has been teaching in Iqaluit for more than 10 years. “Iqaluit is a city now — there are people here from all kinds of communities and from the south, and I really want to keep Inuktitut alive even in a big community like this because a lot of kids are losing (the language) right now.”
In the spring of 2002, the results of a basic Inuktitut literacy test showed a worrisome state of affairs in Iqaluit. More than 60 percent of students at Inukshuk high school were considered illiterate or semi-literate in Inuktitut. David Lloyd, the high school’s vice principal, has been an educator in the eastern Arctic for 20 years. And for 20 years, he’s been frustrated with language delivery in schools.
“One of the challenges we have is finding and keeping qualified staff. We’ve had a lot of great teachers, but they’ve all moved on to other positions,” he says. “Most certainly the Inuktitut courses we offer here are not enough, but until such a time when there are more Inuktitut educators that want to teach, and are qualified to teach at the junior and senior level, then it’s all we can do right now.” (Inukshuk high school has only two Inuktitut teachers, who currently teach more than 200 students of all grade levels.)
Inuktitut teachers are in short supply across the territory. Schools compete for educated and qualified Inuit employees with the territorial government — which aims to have an 85-percent Inuit staff by 2010 — as well as the federal government and other Inuit organizations. “Unfortunately teachers get burnt out, and government jobs look attractive. There’s no homework at night,” says Millie Kuliktana. The result is an ever-dwindling supply of Inuktitut-speaking teachers at the senior level, where they are most needed. “In senior levels students should be taught by university educated teachers and subject specialists,” adds David Lloyd.
Even if the sky were to open up and rain Inuktitut teachers, educators would still have to get by with a limited, and in some cases, non-existent stock of senior level Inuktitut curriculum and exciting literature. “We don’t have enough reading material that is interesting enough for kids to really get excited about, like Harry Potter,” says language commissioner Eva Aariak.
Inuktitut literature in Iqaluit’s high school consists of dull and outdated government publications on whales and rare birds, and a few locally written children’s books. It’s a start, but “It’s going to take an infusion of a significant amount of money and people resources to develop senior curriculum — someone will have to take the time to create it,” David Lloyd says.
The education department is, in fact, currently slogging away on Inuktitut curriculum for junior and senior level science and language arts courses. Cathy McGreggor, director of curriculum and school services, says that work has yet to begin on environmental studies, history and geography. “The emphasis for so long has been on getting curriculum for the primary grades,” she says.
NUNAVUT’S OFFICE OF THE LANGUAGE COMMISSIONER is pushing for, among other language initiatves, an education act that will address needs such as teacher and curriculum shortages. Aariak wants the act to mandate that all students have the right to be schooled in Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun at all grade levels. The education bill goes back to the drawing board this fall after it was tossed out of the legislative assembly in March because it did little to promote and secure Inuit languages in schools — in other words, its mandate.
Educators are also continuing to struggle with the issue of bilingualism. How do you develop a strong first language and effectively introduce another while maintaining proficiency in both? The education department is working to provide each community with its own teaching model based on its unique requirements. Because the health of Inuit languages varies across the territory, each community will execute its own model to foster bilingualism. Schools supporting a transient and culturally diverse population, such as in Iqaluit and Rankin Inlet, will have different needs than schools with a high percentage of Inuit students who already speak Inuktitut at home.
It may be wise to heed the successes of the territory’s eastern neighbour. Greenland has become a shining beacon for language resuscitation. The state of its native language, Kalaallisut, has made remarkable leaps over the past two decades, and is spoken by about 98 percent of Greenlanders. It helps that Greenland is a self-governing country with decision-making capabilities beyond those of Nunavut’s, but it boasts a groundswell of institutions for every imaginable aspect of language maintenance. There is a working group on language policy, a language advisory committee, a committee dedicated to naming places and people, a special bureau of translation and a publishing house that pumps out contemporary books in Kalaallisut.
“One of the reasons Greenland’s Inuit language is so strong is because they translate so many books into Greenlandic,” Nunavut’s Aariak says. Greenlanders can read, in their own language, books ranging from Shakespeare to George Orwell to J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular Harry Potter series, and their publishing house releases about 75 new school materials and around 35 Greenlandic novels and non-fiction works a year.
But for all the blame and worry surrounding Inuktitut’s fate in Nunavut, there is a heartening force working to protect it. Last December, a committee report reviewing the languages act demanded that Inuktitut enjoy the same rights as English. By the end of the year, Inuit will be able to “File,” “Save” and “Upload” on their computers in Inuktitut. Computer giant Microsoft plans to release its Windows program in roman orthography Inuktitut that can be downloaded for free off its website. Igloolik’s Isuma Productions, which produced the multiple-award-winning film Atanarjuat, has compiled a multi-media Inuit culture series and reader for sale on its website. The Isuma Inuit Culture Kit, launched in May, includes videos, DVDs and an Inuit Studies Reader and teacher’s guide all about Inuit life, culture and history. The territorial education department has already ordered 50 copies.
No one disputes the importance of keeping Inuktitut alive, but many are wary of expensive and sluggish government initiatives, and consider them futile if people aren’t speaking Inuktitut as a matter of course. “An institution can destroy a language, but it can’t rebuild a language,” says linguist Mick Mallon. “It takes commitment on the part of parents. It takes the home to recreate it.”
THE AFTERNOON INUKTITUTclass at Iqaluit’s high school has settled into a dull hum as the students get into their sewing projects, a traditional activity that is part of the Inuktitut curriculum here.
Emily Ipeelie is poking the final stitches into a plush stuffed soccer ball. Of her classmates, she is the only one entirely fluent in both written and spoken Inuktitut. “My mom makes me speak it at home. She won’t talk to me unless I reply in Inuktitut. It’s great because I know what everyone is saying and I can read anything,” she says looking down at her hands. “I know my culture.”
Languages by the number
Northwest Territories
98.2% English
8.5% French
6% Dogrib
4.3% South Slavey
2.8% Inuktitut
2.7% North Slavey
1.3% Chipewyan
0.9% Kutchin-Gwich’in
0.7% Cree
*Source: 2001 Census
The Arctic*
Reported Inuktitut use at home
(all ages)
1996 - 68%
2001 - 64%
Reported Inuktitut use at home
(age 14 and under)
1996 - 80%
2001 - 80%
Know Inuktitut well enough to
converse (all ages)
1996 - 82%
2001 - 82%
Reported Inuktitut mother tongue
1996 - 78%
2001 - 77%
* includes Nunavut, Nunavik (Arctic Quebec ) and Labrador. Source: 2001 Aboriginal
Peoples Survey
Yukon Territory
Adults who can speak or understand one of the eight aboriginal languages in the Yukon: 45%
Percentage who can understand their primary aboriginal language:
50% very well
47% with effort, or a few words
Percentage who use their primary language at home:
•all the time or most of the time: 14%
•some of the time: 28%
•very seldom or not at all: 56%
Percentage who use their primary language at school:
•all the time or most of the time: 4%
•some of the time: 8%
•very seldom or not at all: 76%
Source: Statistics Canada
