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Inuktitut

Table of contents

1 Varieties 2 Linguistics 2.1 The syllabary 3 Legal status 4 External links

Varieties

It is more in the nature of a dialect continuum than a single language; this continuum can be divided into roughly sixteen varieties, in four groups:

• Iñupiaq; (northern Alaska)
• Inuinnaqtun (Canadian Western Arctic)
• Inuktitut proper (Canadian Eastern Arctic)
• Kalaallisut or Greenlandic (Greenland).

Linguistics

It is related to the Aleut language, and together they form the Eskimo-Aleut family; while this has no proven wider affinities, some postulation has taken place as to the relation of Inuktitut to the Indo-European languages and to the Nostratic superphylum.

Inuktitut, like other Eskimo-Aleut languages, represents a particular type of agglutinative language called a polysynthetic language: it "synthesizes" a root and various grammatical affixes to create long words with sentence-like meanings.

The syllabary

The Inuktitut syllabary is based on the Cree syllabary, which is in turn based on that of Ojibwe. Both of these were created by missionary James Evans. The syllabary for Inuktitut was adopted by the Inuit Cultural Institute in Canada in the 1970s. Inuit in Alaska and Greenland use a Roman script, and Inuit in Siberia use Cyrillic letters.

Though conventionally called a syllabary, the writing system is, strictly speaking, an abugida, since syllables starting with the same consonant have related glyphs rather than unrelated ones.

See also: Yupik, Inupik. Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

Legal status

• Greenland (Greenlandic, with Danish)
• Nunavut, Canada (Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun, with English and French)
• Northwest Territories, Canada (Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, and Inuvialuktun, with Chipewyan, Cree, English, French, Gwich'in, Slavey, and Tli Cho).

External links

• Inuktitut - English Dictionary
• Nunavut Living Dictionary

Source | Copyright