Inuit Languages and Dialects: Inuit Uqausiqatigiit

Introduction

In April 1980, when visiting Greenland for the first time, I was given the opportunity to spend a couple of weeks on the east coast of the island, an area not often visited by foreigners or by the Greenlanders themselves. At that time, I was already speaking Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, a language I had learned in Nunavik (Arctic Quebec) and the Baffin region. Upon arriving in East Greenland, I was expecting great difficulties in understanding the local people, as I knew that their way of speaking the Inuit language was rather peculiar. For instance, they tended to pronounce u as if it was i. Between two vowels, consonants t, k and q respectively became l, g and r, but within groupings, it was l, g and r that became t, k and q.

Contrary to my expectations, however, the pronunciation of the language did not pose as much of a problem as I had thought it would. I rapidly became used to the local accent, and when I was asked something like: qatsinik qilirnararpit?, I understood that people were asking me how many children I had (qatsinik qiturngaqarpit?), and I answered: martinnik qilirnararpua, I have two kids (marlunnik or marruunnik qiturngaqarpunga).

Problems mainly arose when the East Greenlanders were using words that did not exist – or were given another meaning – elsewhere. For instance, when asked what my children were: tikkartiinniit nuliakkartiinniit, I knew that people wanted to know whether they were tiggaq (tiggarluunniit) or nuliakkaq (nuliakkarluunniit), but then, what exactly was a tiggaq or a nuliakkaq? From my Canadian experience, I knew that in the Eastern Arctic, tiggaq means a rutting (and stinking) male seal. As for nuliakkaq, I could guess the meaning of the word (it sounds somewhat dirty and I will not try to translate it here), but I was unable to fully understand it. What was the relation, then, between my children and a tiggaq or a nuliakkaq?

I finally understood when somebody explained to me that tikkaq (tiggaq) and nuliakkaq were the East Greenlandic words for male and female. People simply wanted to know if my kids were boys or girls. So, after all, even these words were not as strange as I had thought, and within a week, I had learned that the ear was called tusaat (which is used for hearing), the eye uitsat (which is used for blinking), the arctic char kapurniangaq ("which is caught with a kakivak, a three-pronged spear"), the arctic owl kiialik (which has a face), etc. I realized, then, that despite some differences, the Inuit really speak one language.

This was confirmed to me a few years later, in 1987, when I stood at the other end of the Inuit world, in Nome, Seward Peninsula, Alaska, near Bering Strait. I met there with an old lady from the Fish River area, east of Nome. She was glad to have a chance to speak Inupiaqtun, a language which, she said, was used by a decreasing number of people. We understood each other quite well (probably because we limited our conversation to very basic topics), but she noticed that my pronunciation and vocabulary were not exactly like her own. Finally, she decided that I was probably speaking the Malimiutun dialect, from the Kotzebue (northwestern Alaska) area. To her ears then, the similarity between Eastern Canadian Inuktitut and the Alaskan dialects was such that she misunderstood the origin of the language I was using.

This basic unity of the language of the Inuit, which makes it understandable – after some adaptations – from one end of the Arctic to the other, explains why we habitually speak about Inuit dialects, rather than languages. A dialect is a way of speaking which is specific to a local or regional group of people. It may be subdivided into smaller units, the subdialects. All dialects that are mutually intelligible (i.e, whose speakers can understand each other’s speech) constitute a language. Within a language, some dialects are more similar one to another than they are to other dialects of the same language: they constitute groups of dialects.

As we have seen for instance, all Inuit, from Bering Strait to East Greenland, are able to understand each other, even if this supposes some effort. Most of the phonemes (i.e, the basic functional units of pronunciation), words and grammatical rules they use are quite similar. So, Inuit may be said to speak one language, the Inuit language. Within this language, there exist some groups of more closely related speech forms. For example, the Inuit of the Eastern Canadian Arctic have fewer problems understanding each other than they have understanding people from Greenland or the Western Arctic. This is why the various dialects they speak (Labrador dialect, Nunavik dialect, South Baffin dialect, etc.) are considered as belonging to the same group: Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. Some of these dialects are further subdivided into smaller units. The Nunavik dialect for instance includes two of these units: the Tarramiut subdialect and the Itivimiut subdialect.

Languages whose grammar and vocabulary are somewhat similar, although not mutually intelligible, constitute language families. In southern Alaska, the Aleutian Islands and the Chukotka Peninsula (Siberia), there exist six languages that are quite akin to the Inuit language but cannot be understood by Inuit speakers. Linguists call these languages (Inuit and the six other languages) the Eskimo-Aleut (or Eskaleut) family. Within this family, some languages are more closely related among themselves. They form a language branch. For instance, Inuit and the south Alaskan and Siberian Yupik languages constitute the Eskimo branch of the Eskimo-Aleut family. A branch may be further subdivided into subbranches. When a branch or subbranch includes only one language, it bears no special name.

To summarize, and to give an example, I could say that the way of speaking Inuktitut I first learned, in the community of Quaqtaq (northern Nunavik), belongs to the following categories:

Dialectology is the study of the distribution and main characteristics of the various dialects of one language or of a group of related languages. The knowledge of this distribution and characteristics may be useful to people involved in teaching, translating, writing, etc., as it helps them better assess to what extent they can understand – or can be understood by – other speakers of the same language. For the Inuit, dialectology is an important tool for discovering how, despite some superficial diversity, the various dialects they speak do constitute in fact one single language, whose similarities are much more important than its differences.

These similarities and differences will be described in the following chapters. As I do not know all Eskimo languages and Inuit dialects (nobody does!), my description is based on data collected by various people. In Chapter 10, I discuss the type of research conducted by these specialists. And the written documents I used while working on this book are listed in the bibliography. I avoided mentioning them in the text, as I did not want to overcharge it with countless references.

I owe a particular debt to some very special individuals. Susan Sammons and Naudla Arnaquq from, respectively, Nunavut Arctic College and the Nunavut education authorities, had the idea of undertaking this study and provided me with some very precious linguistic and editorial counselling. Steven Jacobson and Lawrence Kaplan, from the Alaska Native Language Center (University of Alaska Fairbanks); Michael Fortescue, from the University of Copenhagen’s Institut for Eskimologi and Department of Linguistics; Per Langgard, formerly with Nuuk’s Ilisimatusarfik (University of Greenland); Ronald Lowe, from Quebec’s Université Laval; and the late Dirmid R.F. Collis, all of them world-class specialists of Eskaleut studies, read various chapters of my manuscript in order to correct the unavoidable errors that had crept into my text. To them all, my most heartfelt thanks, and the assurance that the shortcomings that may still subsist in this final version are entirely due to my own limitations.

Chapter 1

The Eskaleut Family

All languages spoken by Eskimo (Inuit and Yupiit) people, as well as the language of the Aleuts (the natives of the Aleutian Islands, in southwestern Alaska), belong to the same family: the Eskaleut (or Eskimo-Aleut) family. This family comprises a total of seven languages, divided into two branches:

1.1 Geographical Distribution

The Eskaleut family extends from the Bering Sea area, in the west, to the shores of the Strait of Denmark (between Greenland and Iceland), in the east (see Map 1). It covers four countries: Russia (Siberian Chukotka; Commander Islands); the USA (coastal Alaska); Canada (the Inuvialuit area of the Northwest Territories; the Kitikmeot, Kivalliq and Baffin – or Qikiqtaaluk – regions of Nunavut; Nunavik – or Arctic Quebec; northern Labrador); and Greenland, or Kalaallit Nunaat (which forms a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark). There are some 9,500 kilometres (5,700 miles) between Ostrov Bering, in the Commander Islands (which belong to Russia), the westernmost Aleut settlement, and the village of Ittoqqortoormiit (Scoresbysund), on the east coast of Greenland. The Inuit language is spoken in the Thule (or Avannarsuaq) district (northwest Greenland), at Lat. 78°, where dwells the northernmost permanent human population in the world, but it is also daily heard as far south as Happy Valley (Labrador), at Lat. 53°15’, more to the south than Edmonton, Copenhagen or Moscow. The Aleuts of Atka Island (Alaska) even live at 52°15’, the latitude of London, England.

I will now describe in more detail the geographical distribution of each of the seven Eskaleut languages.

Map 1. The Eskimo-Aleut World

A map distinguishing the Eskimo-Aleut regions. Along the top third of the map is: Russia, Sirenikski, Central Siberian Yupik, Naukanski, Arctic Ocean, Inuit, and Greenlandic Kalaallisut. Along the middle of the map is: Bering Sea, Alaskan Inupiaq, Western Canadian Inuktun, Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, and Atlantic Ocean. At the bottom-left of the map is: Aluet, Pacific Ocean, and Alutiiq.

1.1.1 The Aleut Language

Aleut is spoken in the Commander and Aleutian Islands, which extend from the Kamchatka Peninsula (Russia) to the Alaska Peninsula (southwestern Alaska), and which mark the division between the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Aboriginal Aleuts are not considered Eskimos properly speaking, but their language and traditional culture are related to those of the Yupiit and Inuit. Like them, for instance, they were – and still are, in some measure – sea-mammal hunters who used kayaks and harpoons and lived in semi-subterranean (i.e, partly underground) dwellings (qarmait). It is quite sure that the Aleuts and Inuit share the same distant ancestors.

Most Aleuts (about 3,300 people) are American citizens (the Aleutian Islands belong to Alaska), but some 500 of them live on the Commander Islands, which are part of Russia. Their ancestors were brought there by Russian fur hunters around 1825 (Russians ruled Alaska between 1741 and 1867), although a prehistoric Aleut population appears to have lived on the Commanders at some time. A few hundred Aleuts were also forced to move to the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea (despite their name, these islands belong to the USA), where their descendants are still found. It is said that when Russians first arrived in Alaska in 1741, there were about 16,000 Aleuts, but that 126 years later, in 1867, when Alaska was sold to the United States, only 1,600 of them had survived the epidemics, wars and bad treatments which had followed the arrival of Europeans.

Despite these rather troublesome relations with their conquerors, Aleuts have been deeply influenced by Russian culture. Most of them bear Russian surnames, belong to the Eastern Orthodox Christian church, and still practise some old Russian customs. A few elderly people even speak some Russian, although this language – as English later on – never totally replaced Aboriginal speech.

The Aleut language is subdivided into two dialects: Western and Eastern Aleut (see Map 2). Western Aleut is spoken on Atka and in the Commander Islands, while the Eastern dialect is used in a dozen settlements located in the eastern part of the Aleutians, at the tip of Alaska Peninsula, and on the Pribilof Islands. Prior to World War II, the island of Attu, the westernmost of the Aleutians, harboured an Aboriginal Aleut population (who spoke a subdialect of the Western speech form), but in 1942, the island was invaded by the Japanese and its residents taken to Japan as prisoners. After the war, in 1945, Attuans were liberated, but for supposed security reasons, the American government did not permit them to go back home. They were rather resettled on Atka, the eastern Aleutians and mainland Alaska.

1.1.2 The Eskimo Languages

The Eskimo branch of the Eskaleut family includes three subbranches:

Sirenikski (recently extinct), Yupik and Inuit (see Figure 1).

1.1.2.1 The Yupik Languages and Sirenikski

Four different languages belong to the Yupik subbranch, and one more, Sirenikski, constitutes (or rather constituted, because it disappeared some years ago), a subbranch by itself.

Speakers of the Yupik languages are known under various names: Yupiget in Russia and on Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island; Yupiit, Yupiat or Cupiit (pronounced Chupiit) in southwestern Alaska; and Sugpiat in south central Alaska. All these words mean the same thing: genuine human beings (inutuinnait), bases yug-, cug-, or sug- being the local equivalents of the base inuk-. For simplicity’s sake, we will refer to all of these people as Yupiit, the word used by a majority of them. Two Yupik languages are exclusively spoken in Alaska, one in Russia, and another one in both Russia and Alaska. Sirenikski was spoken in Russia (see Maps 1 and 2).

The southernmost Yupik language is Alutiiq, or Pacific Gulf Yupik, spoken by Sugpiat who live on the southern (Pacific Ocean) coast of Alaska. The total Yupiit population for this area reaches about 3,500 people, although the actual number of individuals now speaking Alutiiq is much smaller (see next chapter). These Pacific Eskimos often call themselves Aleut (hence the name of their tongue), although their language is completely different from that of Aboriginal people living in the Aleutians (it is nearer to Central Alaskan Yup’ik). Confusion originates from the Russian period, when several Aleuts from the Aleutian Islands were transferred to southern Alaska. Like the Aleuts, Pacific Gulf natives have strongly felt Russian influence. Many of them are so-called Creoles, i.e, descendants of mixed YupiitRussian families.

Alutiiq is subdivided into two dialects. The Chugach dialect is spoken on Prince William Sound and Kenai Peninsula, east and south of the city of Anchorage (which stands outside Yupiit territory, although hosting a large population of Aboriginal migrants), while the Koniag dialect is used on Kodiak Island (where a few thousand non-natives also live) and on Alaska Peninsula, east of Aleut territory. In a couple of locations (such as the town of Cordova), Chugach speakers are in contact with Eyak and other Alaskan Indians using Dene languages.

Figure 1. Eskaleut Languages and Dialects

Northwest of the Alutiiq area, in the valley of the Nushagak River as well as in the plains of the lower Kuskokwim and Yukon Rivers, and also on Nunivak Island, are found the central Yupiit, the most populous Eskimo group in Alaska (25,000 individuals living in some 65 villages). They speak Central Alaskan Yup’ik. This language is in daily use in most locations, much less so, however, in the largest settlement, Bethel, the capital of the Yupiit territory. The fact that Central Yupiit had fewer contacts with early settlers (Russians and 19th-century Americans) than Aleuts and Pacific Gulf Yupiit may explain why their language is still quite strong.

Central Alaskan Yup’ik is subdivided into four dialects. The most important among them (spoken in 56 out of 65 communities) is called General Central Yup’ik and is heard in the major part of the Yupiit area.

The people of Mekoryuk (Miqqurjuk) on Nunivak Island have their own speech form (Nunivak dialect), as well as those living in Hooper Bay and Chevak (Hooper Bay/Chevak – or HBC – dialect), two small coastal communities northeast of Nunivak. These two dialects share some similarities with Alutiiq, although they clearly belong to Central Alaskan Yup’ik.

The fourth dialect, called Unaliq (no connection with the Cree Indians, which the Kivalliq Inuit also call Unaliq), has a rather erratic distribution. At the end of the 19th century, it was in use all around Norton Sound, the large body of water south of Seward Peninsula. However, due to the southward migration of the Inuit, at the beginning of the 20th century, many former Unaliq-speaking Yupiit villages were now occupied by speakers of Alaskan Inupiaq. The result is that today, the Unaliq dialect is heard in only six villages, somewhat isolated one from another: Kotlik, Stebbins and St. Michael, on the south shore of Norton Sound; Elim and Golovin, on the north shore; and Unalakleet (Ungalalliq), on the east shore. Unalakleet is a unique linguistic crossroads, at the junction of Yupiit and Inuit territories, where two Aboriginal languages (comprising a total of three dialects) are spoken: Central Alaskan Yup’ik (Unaliq dialect) and Inupiaq Inuit (Qawiaraq and Malimiutun dialects). This linguistic diversity may be linked to the fact that Unalakleet is considered to be the oldest Eskimo community in the world. Actually, it lies a few kilometres south of Cape Denbigh (which is clearly visible from the village), the site of one of the earliest prehistoric Inuit cultures (dating back to some 4,500 years ago).

West of Norton Sound, in the Bering Sea, stands St. Lawrence Island. It belongs to the United States, although the nearest land is southern Chukotka, in Russia. The 1,200, or so, St. Lawrence Islanders speak Central Siberian Yupik. This language is also spoken by – or is the ancestral language to – about two-thirds of the some 1,300 Russian Yupiget (or Asiatic Eskimos). As a matter of fact, in spite of political boundaries, the Aboriginal populations of St. Lawrence Island (villages of Gambell and Savoonga) and of southern Chukotka (towns of Provideniya, Novo Chaplino and Sireniki) constitute one social and cultural unit. They speak the same language (there are not even dialectal differences between the two areas), share a common traditional culture (both are first-class whale and walrus hunters), and are related through kinship. Many St. Lawrence Islanders still have brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts or cousins living in Chukotka. Visits were permitted till 1948, but afterwards, both Russia (then the USSR) and the USA forbade them. It was only 40 years later, in June 1988, that contacts resumed, and they have not stopped since.

Two other languages are spoken in Chukotka: Naukanski and Sirenikski. Naukanski is a Yupik language, used by the Nevuqaq people (the Nevuqarmiit) on the easternmost tip of Siberia. In 1957, their village was closed and they were transferred to other settlements in the area: Nuniamo, Uelen and Lavrentiya. Of some 400 Nevuqarmiit, about 70 still speak their language. As far as mutual intelligibility is concerned, it stands midway between Central Siberian Yupik and Central Alaskan Yup’ik. It seems that when the latter was still spoken on the north shore of Norton Sound (southern Seward Peninsula), all the way to Bering Strait, there existed an east-west linguistic continuum