It was love at first sight — Inuktitut invaded my mind the second I first laid my eyes on the mathematically looking... letters! I gazed upon the script, seemingly designed by an alien race that came from the stars, —precise, triangle-y, something you imagine to see on a side of a spaceship: ᓇᓄᖅ (nuh-nook, "bear"), ᐸᓖᓯ (puh-lee-see, "police"), ᑐᔪᕐᒥᕕᒃ (too-you-r-me-vik, "hotel"). How could I resist this outlandish Arctic call?
Look the Inuktitut language "in the eyes" and tell me you aren't captivated, enthralled, intrigued:
So what is Inuktitut and where does it come from? Inuktitut (ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ — composed of inuk, "person", and titut, "like", "in the manner of"), also known as Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, is an Indigenous language in North America spoken in the Canadian Arctic by approximately 40,000 people, specifically in Nunavut, parts of Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, the Northwest Territories. It's part of a larger Inuit language family which is a group of five languages united under the name Inuktut: Inuvialuktun, Inuinnaqtun, and three dialects of Inuktitut. These languages are spoken by the Inuit indigenous groups of Canada, circum-polar regions of Alaska and Greenland, and a small Inuit-speaking Greenlandic population in Denmark.
Non-Inuit typically refer to the language as Inuktitut; however, the speakers themselves have different names for the language in their own dialects. For instance, it is called Inuttut in Nunatsiavut (Northern Labrador), Inuttitut in Nunavik (Northern Quebec), and Inuktitut in much of Nunavut. While each dialect is unique to a particular region and group of speakers, the closer together two dialects are geographically, the easier it is for their speakers to understand one another.
There are two interesting qualities of the Inuktitut language we hadn't come across yet during our whole Langventure journey:
- it is polysynthetic
- and it uses syllabics, not the alphabet.
Polysynthetic languages are similar to agglutinative ones, like Turkish, in the fact that they use specific chunks of letters called morphemes (instead of independent words) joined together to express an idea. Only in Turkish those chunks are affixes and suffixes connected to the root of a verb, whereas Inuktitut uses multiple morphemes joined into a single word to convey an entire sentence or phrase! Like so:
ᑐᓵᑦᓯᐊᕈᓐᓇᖖᒋᑦᑐᐊᓘᔪᖓ (tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga) — "I can't hear very well", or
- tusaa-: "to hear", followed by seven suffixes (a vowel-beginning suffix always erases the final consonant of the preceding consonant-ending suffix)
- -tsiaq-: "well"
- -junnaq- (or -gunnaq-): "be able to"
- -nngit-: negation
- -tu(q): indicative third-person singular (in fact a nominal form)
- -alu(k)-: augmentative ("very")
- -u-: "be"
- -junga: indicative first-person singular (itself composed of the indicative morpheme -ju- and the first person marker -nga)
Inuktitut is full of lengthy words. Some phrases that would be five or six words in English are usually one or two longer words when translated into this polysynthetic Eskimo language. Every word in Inuktitut has a root, and it's always the first thing with which a word starts. After a root, there go affixes, the number of which is quite large (including those that modify tense — past, present or future — by describing how far in the past or the future a described event takes place), and word endings. Verbs carry inflections for person and number of both subject and object. Nouns in Inuktitut have no gender marking and about 8 different cases.
Syllabics is a writing system composed by combinations of consonants and vowels, a.k.a. syllables, hence the name. Unlike the Hindi abugida, vowel sounds here can't be suppressed or modified by any additional symbol. So, basically, it's closer to the Japanese kana, but the difference is in the number of symbols used. The Inuktitut language has just 14 consonants and only 3 vowels: i, a, u — that can be either short or long, and the length affects the meaning of the word.
Most of the sounds are just like the ones we have in English, but a couple of them may require some level of training, so go ahead and check out their pronunciation one by one clicking this link here.
In Inuktitut, words can only begin with i, u, a, p, t, k, m, n, s or q. They can only end with i, u, a, p, t, k and q. Most consonants can be doubled, which changes the meaning of a word, but consonant clusters are never longer than two consecutive letters. You will also have to keep your ear sharp for the stress position; it isn't always obvious and it also affects word meaning.
Like many languages, Inuktitut was purely an oral language. Its syllabics was created in 1840s by James Evans, a missionary in Manitoba. Nowadays, it also has a version written in Roman orthography — by the way, quite intuitive to learn (unlike the Chinese pinyin, for example). Let's note here that Inuktitut spellings vary throughout the regions where the language is spoken.
Inuktitut grammar is quite complex due to its rich and intricate morphology. What instantly jumped out at me is that for nouns (and, subsequently, for verbs to be in agreement with those nouns) there are three different number options: singular, dual and plural. The dual number means that two people or objects are joined as if in one and act as one unit — so just from this one little tweak on a word you can understand right away whether it's about two of something/someone or many:
- ᐃᓄᒃ: inuk, person, as in 1 man or woman;
- ᐃᓅᒃ: inuuk, 2 people,
- ᐃᓄᐃᑦ: inuit, 3 and more people.
Same is true for the pronouns we, you, they: there can be two or more of us, you, them and these words (as well as the verbs related to them) will differ.
Let's sum up some of that knowledge about Inuktitut with a short video from Tom (4:05):
These days, that almost all people in the Canadian North know and use English, the Inuktitut language is starting to almost disappear. But you've seen firsthand how unusual, perplexing and enchanting it can be. And I was even more surprised by the fact that just with a handful of sounds in their native language the indigenous people are great storytellers and known for this particular skillset. That is exactly the reason why I started my article with a story-like paragraph.
And as we're learning more about the sounds and letters of a language from the North, let's also introduce ourselves to some of its words and concepts — in the next (and our last) Episode of Langventure! See you there!
ᑕᕝᕙᐅᕗᓯ! (Tuh-vow-voo-see!) Goodbye (to more than 2 people ;))!
"Quviasuttunga (I am happy) to learn about Inuktitut!"
Discover more about Inuktitut and other languages at langventure.mystrikingly.com!
