It’s week 13 and we’re moving on to yet enough continent in our quest to discover more about different languages around the world. Traditionally spoken in the Arctic north of America, these are our Five Fun Facts about Inuit!
1) The Inuit language is divided into two major dialect groups, Inupik and Yupik. Inupik is the larger of the two and is traditionally spoken across the North American Arctic. The related Yupik languages are spoken in western and southern Alaska and far eastern Russia, where they are severely endangered.
2) The global population of speakers of Inuit language variants is estimated to be just over 90,000 people. These 90,000 people are divided into a number of smaller dialect groups. For example, Alaskan Inuit speak four distinct dialects: Qawiaraq, of which a Bering Strait dialect is considered separate by some; Inupiatun; and Malimiutun.
Distribution of Inuit language variants across the Arctic (click for full sized image).
3) The Inuit language has a rich morphological system, in which a succession of different morphemes are added to root words to indicate things that, in English, would require several words to express. All Inuit language 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. This system makes words very long, and potentially unique. For example in central Nunavut Inuktitut:
tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga
I can't hear very well.
This long word is composed of a root word tusaa- 'to hear' followed by five suffixes:
-tsiaq- well
-junnaq- be able to
-nngit- not
-tualuu- very much
-junga 1st pers. singular present indicative non-specific
4) It is commonly believed that the Inuit have a huge number of words for snow. This is not correct and, in fact, Inuit have only a few base words for snow: ‘qanniq-’, used most often like the verb to snow, and ‘aput’, referring to snow as a substance. The affixes which are added to these words to modify them, for example to create phrases such as ‘falling snow’, ‘snow on the ground’ and ‘snow drift’, give the impression of Inuit having lots of different words for snow, but this is not really accurate.
5) The Inuit in Nunavut and Nunavik in Quebec use the Inuktitut syllabics writing system to write their language. In 1976, the Language Commission of the Inuit Cultural Institute made it the co-official script for the Inuit languages, along with the Latin script. A chart of the script can be found below.
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Esperanto!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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