Abstract Summary
By failing to address the important cultural and political functions that dialectal diversity serves between Indigenous communities this presentation discusses the effects of centralised language planning on Inuit in Nunavut, Canada. This includes a discussion of the current state of language politics in Nunavut and also a comparison with Greenland.
Abstract :
Within Canada, language revitalisation efforts among Indigenous communities are commonly undertaken with minimal resources and little formal support from federal, provincial, or territorial governments. A notable exception to this is the case of Nunavut, a territory established as a public government and as partial fulfillment of the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., 1993). This presentation will consider the political implications of current efforts underway by the Government of Nunavut and its supported agencies to standardise the writing system of Inuktitut. A great deal has been written in support of language standardisation as a method for language revitalisation (Fishman, 1991; Grenoble & Whaley, 2006; Hinton, 2013) especially in the context of a State which guarantees these language protections (Fishman, 1991; Hinton, 2013). This presentation will compare Nunavut with the example of Greenland (Dorais, 1990, 2010) to demonstrate how the selection of an official standard, one endorsed by the State especially, has intense, detrimental effects on dialects not chosen as the official standard. Additionally, the history of dialectal differences within Nunavut will be considered based on a political reading of an earlier effort to standardise the transcription system between Inuktitut syllabics and roman orthography (Dorais, 2010; Palluq-Cloutier, 2014). It will be argued that writing systems are not simply a function of a modern nation-State (Poulantzas, 2001), but are intimately tied into questions of sovereignty and the sense of cultural distinctness from both internal, from other Inuit, and external actors, the rest of Canada or globally. The effects of neglecting these differences results in switching to the coloniser’s language when dialectal differences are obvious to the interlocutors (Palluq-Cloutier, 2014) or in regions where Inuktitut is spoken by fewer people, the standard form is substituted for English as the language of public life (Statistics Canada, 2019).
