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35-599: Chesterfield Inlet ( Inuit : Igluligaarjuk ) is an inlet in Kivalliq Region , Nunavut , Canada. It is an arm of northwestern Hudson Bay , and the end point of the Thelon River after its passage through Baker Lake . Cross Bay, a large widening of the inlet, occurs 30 kilometres (19 mi) east of Baker Lake. There are several islands located within the inlet. The first European here may have been William Moor in 1747 who sent boat parties about 60 miles up

70-510: 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 article Inuit grammar describes primarily central Nunavut dialects, but the basic principles will generally apply to all of them and to some degree to Yupik languages as well. Both

105-522: 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 of Igloolik versus

140-577: A linguistic grouping. Early forms of the Inuit language are believed to have been spoken by the Thule people , who migrated east from Beringia towards the Arctic Archipelago , which had been occupied by people of the Dorset culture since the beginning of the 2nd millennium . By 1300, the Inuit and their language had reached western Greenland, and finally east Greenland roughly at the same time

175-506: 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 called Kalaallisut . In other languages, it is often called Greenlandic or some cognate term. The Inuit languages of Alaska are called Inupiatun , but

210-795: 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 other Indo-European languages do. This system makes words very long, and potentially unique. For example, in central Nunavut Inuktitut : tusaa- to hear -tsiaq- well -junnaq- be able to -nngit- not -tualuu- very much -junga 1SG . PRES . IND . NSP tusaa- -tsiaq- -junnaq- -nngit- -tualuu- -junga {to hear} well {be able to} not {very much} 1SG.PRES.IND. NSP I cannot hear very well. This sort of word construction

245-447: Is called Inuttitut by its speakers, and often by other people, but this is a minor variation in pronunciation. In Labrador , the language is called Inuttut or, often in official documents, by the more descriptive name Labradorimiutut . Furthermore, Canadians – both Inuit and non-Inuit – sometimes use the word Inuktitut to refer to all Inuit language variants, including those of Alaska and Greenland. The phrase "Inuit language"

280-411: 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. According to the 2021 Canadian census , the Inuit population of Canada is 70,540, of which 33,790 report Inuit as their first language. Greenland and Canada account for

315-453: 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: The western Alaskan variants retain

350-404: 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 term Inuktut . Although many people refer to

385-590: 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 verb to snow , and 'aput', which means snow 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

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420-574: Is pervasive in the Inuit languages and makes them very unlike English. In one large Canadian corpus – the Nunavut Hansard – 92% of all words appear only once, in contrast to a small percentage in most English corpora of similar size. This makes the application of Zipf's law quite difficult in the Inuit language. Furthermore, the notion of a part 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

455-471: The retroflex , which was present in proto-Inuit language. Retroflexes have disappeared in all the Canadian and Greenlandic dialects. In Natsilingmiutut, the voiced 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

490-685: The Viking 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 possible enclave of the Dorset, the Sadlermiut (in modern Inuktitut spelling Sallirmiut ), existed on Southampton Island . Almost nothing

525-530: The 1920s, changes in lifestyle and serious epidemics like tuberculosis made the government 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

560-417: The 1940s, the Inuit were given disc numbers , recorded on a special leather ID tag, like a dog 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

595-649: The Americas or northeast Asia, although there have been some unsubstantiated proposals that they are distantly related to the Uralic languages of western Siberia and northern Europe, in a proposed Uralo-Siberian grouping, or even to the Indo-European languages as part of a Nostratic superphylum. Some had previously lumped them in with the Paleosiberian languages , though that is a geographic rather than

630-534: The Danish state church) in Greenland. Several major dictionaries were created, beginning with Poul Egedes's Dictionarium Grönlandico-danico-latinum (1750) and culminating with Samuel Kleinschmidt's (1871) "Den grønlandske ordbog" (Transl. "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

665-493: 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 mainland Denmark , and according to the 2001 census roughly 200 self-reported Inuktitut native speakers regularly live in parts of Canada which are outside traditional Inuit lands. Of

700-692: The Inuit language as Eskimo language , this is a broad term that also includes the Yupik languages , and is in addition strongly discouraged in Canada and diminishing in usage elsewhere. See the article on Eskimo for more information on this word. The Inuit languages constitute a branch of the Eskimo–Aleut language family . They are closely related to the Yupik languages and more remotely to Aleut . These other languages are all spoken in western Alaska , United States, and eastern Chukotka , Russia. They are not discernibly related to other indigenous languages of

735-413: 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 a dialect 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

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770-508: 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 different morphemes 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 and Polysynthetic language ) All Inuit words begin with

805-508: 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. An estimated 7,000 Greenlandic Inuit live in Denmark , the largest group outside of North America. Thus, the total population of Inuit speakers is about 100,000 people. The traditional language of the Inuit is a system of closely interrelated dialects that are not readily comprehensible from one end of

840-621: 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

875-497: The dialect of Iqaluit , 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

910-463: The inlet. In 1762 William Christopher followed the whole inlet to Baker Lake. The Inuit hamlet of the same name, Chesterfield Inlet , is situated near the waterway's mouth. In previous times, the area was home to Aivilingmiut and Qaernermiut . This Kivalliq Region , Nunavut location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Inuit languages The total population of Inuit speaking their traditional languages

945-593: The name of a dead person or a class of things, they could take some of their characteristics or powers, and enjoy a part of their identity. (This is why they were always very willing to accept European names: they believed that this made them equal to the Europeans.) 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

980-808: The names of places and people tend to be highly prosaic when translated. Iqaluit , for example, is simply the plural of the noun iqaluk "fish" ("Arctic char", "salmon" or "trout" depending on dialect ). Igloolik ( Iglulik ) means place with houses , a word that could be interpreted as simply town ; Inuvik is place of people ; Baffin Island , Qikiqtaaluk in Inuktitut, translates approximately to "big island". Although practically all Inuit have legal names based on southern naming traditions, at home and among themselves they still use native naming traditions. There too, names tend to consist of highly prosaic words. The Inuit traditionally believed that by adopting

1015-429: 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, headed by Abe Okpik , to replace number-names with patrilineal "family surnames". A popular belief exists that the Inuit have an unusually large number of words for snow . This

1050-747: The roughly 13,000 Alaskan Iñupiat , as few as 3000 may still be able to speak the Iñupiaq, with most of them over the age of 40. Alaskan Inupiat speak three distinct dialects, which have difficult mutual intelligibility: The Inuit languages are official in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut (the dominant language in the latter); have a high level of official support in Nunavik , a semi-autonomous portion of Quebec ; and are still spoken in some parts of Labrador . Generally, Canadians refer to all dialects spoken in Canada as Inuktitut , but

1085-478: The terms Inuvialuktun , Inuinnaqtun , and Inuttut (also called Nunatsiavummiutut , Labradorimiutut or Inuttitut ) 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

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1120-501: The variants of the Seward Peninsula are distinguished from the other Alaskan variants by calling them Qawiaraq , or for some dialects, Bering Strait Inupiatun . In Canada, the word Inuktitut 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 of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories . However, one of

1155-517: The variants of western Nunavut, and the eastern Northwest Territories, is called Inuinnaqtun to distinguish itself from the dialects of eastern Canada, while the variants of the Northwest Territories are sometimes called Inuvialuktun and have in the past sometimes been called Inuktun . In those dialects, the name is sometimes rendered as Inuktitun to reflect dialectal differences in pronunciation. The Inuit language of Quebec

1190-451: Was abetted by the churches and missionaries, who viewed the traditional names and their calls to power as related to shamanism and paganism . 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 become Annie E7-121 . People adopted the number-names, their family members' numbers, etc., and learned all

1225-656: 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 fifteen consonants and three vowels (which can be long or short). Consonants are arranged with five places of articulation : bilabial , alveolar , palatal , velar and uvular ; and three manners of articulation : voiceless stops , voiced continuants , and nasals , as well as two additional sounds—voiceless fricatives . The Alaskan dialects have an additional manner of articulation,

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