Inuktitut
Inuktitut (lit. 'Like the Inuit') is the language of the Inuit people.
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2 Linguistics 3 Legal status 4 External links |
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:
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 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
Varieties
All Inuktitut varieties taken together have a speaking population of approximately 80,000.Linguistics
The syllabary
Legal status
Inuktitut is an official language in the following areas: