WORKING TO SAVE LANGUAGE IN PERIL
Inuit volunteers using social media to help young people learn Inuktut
In Canada’s north, Inuit students are leading a linguistic renaissance, reversing generations of language loss using social media.
Scroll through the Instagram feed of Inuktitut Ilinniaqta and you’ll find hyper stylized visuals steeped in northern imagery — the aurora borealis, snow-covered vistas and larger than life animals — paired with Inuktut vocabulary and English translations.
These digital flash cards are helping an online generation learn their ancestral language.
“To keep a language alive, it has to be communicated on the internet,” explains Isaac Demeester, the project’s creator.
For decades, government policy silenced Indigenous languages. Residential schools cut children off from their parents, culture and mother tongues, forcing them to speak English or French. In recent years, Indigenous languages have continued to decline. While two-thirds of Inuit can speak Inuktut, the umbrella term for Inuit languages including the most widely used one, Inuktitut, these languages are still at risk.
Use is dropping by one per cent every year with one estimate that only four per cent of Inuit will speak Inuktut by 2050. The latest threat is the internet’s homogenizing impact as the digital world demands fluency in digital languages.
The web’s lack of language diversity is well documented (only 500 languages from the world’s 7,000 are used online; Twitter supports just 61).
Meanwhile, English accounts for half of the written text online while only five per cent of people speak it at home.
For a language, online presence can mean the difference between survival and extinction.
About 40 per cent of languages are endangered, many with fewer than 1,000 speakers, and every two weeks another goes silent as the last speaker dies or Indigenous tongues are overwhelmed.
The digital language divide is pushing more Inuit — and countless speakers of other languages — to English.
But that may be starting to change, in part thanks to initiatives like Inuktitut Ilinniaqta and shifts within the language itself.
Inuktut was historically a set of oral languages. Nine writing systems have been invented at various times by missionaries and other outsiders, meaning Inuit didn’t have ownership of their own alphabet.
It also meant that Inuit from neighbouring towns couldn’t comprehend each other’s writing systems.
This partly explains why translating textbooks has been so expensive and why many young Inuit still use English to send texts despite apps that run Inuit-language keyboards.
In 2019, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national Inuit organization, created a unified writing system that works across all dialects.
Created for Inuit, by Inuit, it is a landmark step in decolonizing the alphabet — and a welcome one for those behind Inuktitut Ilinniaqta.
Many of the people who turn to Inuktitut Ilinniaqta for vocabulary, grammar lessons or a connection to Inuit heritage are young people trying to recover something lost, Demeester says.
With a unified script, more people can understand the digital flash cards and, ultimately, access the archive of experiences and knowledge contained in Inuktut. “There are words in Inuktut you could never capture in English,” he explains.
People revitalize language by using, sharing and modernizing it. But language also sustains culture and people. In the north, a new generation is learning Inuktut, connecting with Inuit traditions to ensure they are a vibrant part of the future.
Craig Kielburger is co-founder of the WE Movement, which includes WE Charity, ME to WE Social Enterprise and WE Day.