Inuit languages

Inuktitut is part of a larger Inuit language family that stretches from Alaska to Greenland.

Speakers use their own names for the language: Inuttitut in Nunavik, northern Quebec, Inuttut in Nunatsiavut, northern Labrador, and Inuktitut in much of Nunavut.

Statistics Canada uses Inuktut as a collective term for Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun and the other Inuit languages.

In Nunavik and most of Nunavut, Inuktitut is typically written in syllabics, a system originally created for Cree in the 1840s by the missionary James Evans in Manitoba.

The Roman alphabet is the only writing system used in Labrador and parts of western Nunavut.

Inuktitut is polysynthetic, so its words tend to be longer and structurally more complex than English or French words.

The whole meaning of a sentence can be expressed in one word. Illujuaraalummuulaursimannginamalittauq, glossed as but also, because I never went to the really big house, breaks into 11 morphemes.

The language has more than 1,000 obligatory noun and verb inflections and more than 400 optional word-internal morphemes, such as tense, negation, passive and causative.

In Laura Martin's account, when Franz Boas set out Eskimo snow terms in 1911 he gave four: aput, snow on the ground, qana, falling snow, piqsirpoq, drifting snow, and qimuqsuq, a snowdrift.

In Martin's account, Boas made the point in a section on how languages group ideas, not in the section on the influence of environment on language.

In Martin's account, Benjamin Whorf's 1940 article contrasted English, with one word for snow, with Eskimo, without citing Boas or giving specific data.

Laura Martin argued in 1986 that there is no reason to posit more than two distinct roots for snow itself in any Eskimo language. In West Greenlandic they are qanik, snow in the air, and aput, snow on the ground.

Martin also stressed that Eskimo is not a single language, and that polysynthetic morphology makes a count of words almost pointless because the number of possible words is practically infinite.

In the 2021 census, 41,675 people could conduct a conversation in Inuktitut and 37,520 reported it as their mother tongue.

The smaller Inuit languages were much less widely spoken in 2021: Inuinnaqtun was spoken in conversation by 790 people and Inuvialuktun by 355.

In 2021, 92.2 percent of Inuktut speakers lived in Inuit Nunangat. Of Inuktitut speakers, 60.3 percent lived in Nunavut and 30.9 percent in Nunavik.

In 2021, 70.0 percent of Nunavut residents, and 81.0 percent of Inuit there, could conduct a conversation in Inuktut.

Among Inuit in Nunavut in 2021, 73.7 percent of those under 15 could converse in Inuktut, against 96.2 percent of those aged 55 and over.

Nunavut has four official languages: Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, English and French.