Inuttitut, Inuttut, or Nunatsiavummiutitut is a dialect of

Inuktitut Inuktitut ( ; , Inuktitut syllabics, syllabics ), also known as Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, is one of the principal Inuit languages of Canada. It is spoken in all areas north of the North American tree line, including parts of the provinces of ...

. It is spoken across northern

Labrador Labrador () is a geographic and cultural region within the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is the primarily continental portion of the province and constitutes 71% of the province's area but is home to only 6% of its populatio ...

by the

Inuit Inuit (singular: Inuk) are a group of culturally and historically similar Indigenous peoples traditionally inhabiting the Arctic and Subarctic regions of North America and Russia, including Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwe ...

, whose traditional lands are known as

Nunatsiavut Nunatsiavut (; ) is an autonomous area claimed by the Inuit in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The settlement area includes territory in Labrador extending to the Quebec border. In 2002, the Labrador Inuit Association submitted a proposal for ...

. The language has a distinct writing system, created in

Greenland Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. It is by far the largest geographically of three constituent parts of the kingdom; the other two are metropolitan Denmark and the Faroe Islands. Citizens of Greenlan ...

in the 1760s by German missionaries from the

Moravian Church The Moravian Church, or the Moravian Brethren ( or ), formally the (Latin: "Unity of the Brethren"), is one of the oldest Protestant denominations in Christianity, dating back to the Bohemian Reformation of the 15th century and the original ...

. This separate writing tradition, the remoteness of Nunatsiavut from other

communities, and its unique history of cultural contacts have made it into a distinct dialect with a separate literary tradition. It shares features, including Schneider's Law, the reduction of alternate sequences of consonant clusters by simplification, with some Inuit dialects spoken in Quebec. It is differentiated by the tendency to neutralize velars and uvulars, i.e. ~ , and ~ in word final and pre-consonantal positions, as well as by the assimilation of consonants in clusters, compared to other dialects. Morphological systems (~juk/~vuk) and syntactic patterns (e.g. the ergative) have similarly diverged. Nor are the Labrador dialects uniform: there are separate variants traceable to a number of regions, e.g. Rigolet, Nain,

Hebron Hebron (; , or ; , ) is a Palestinian city in the southern West Bank, south of Jerusalem. Hebron is capital of the Hebron Governorate, the largest Governorates of Palestine, governorate in the West Bank. With a population of 201,063 in ...

, etc. Although Nunatsiavut claims over 4,000 inhabitants of Inuit descent, only 550 reported any Inuit language ( Inuktut) to be their mother tongue in the 2001 census, mostly in the town of Nain. Inuttitut is seriously endangered.

Dialects

At one time, there existed two dialects of the Inuttut language. The northern dialect (spoken mainly in Nain) and the southern dialect (spoken only by a few elders in Rigolet). They differ only in

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

Alphabet

Nunatsiavut uses a

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

devised by German-speaking Moravian missionaries, which includes the letter ''ĸ'' ( ''kra'', often also written with an uppercase K). In 1980, the Labrador Inuit Standardized Writing System was developed during a meeting with elders and educators to provide consistency and clarity. The previous orthography used to represent before uvulars; however, the Labrador Inuttitut no longer has a distinct at the end of syllables. In the new orthography, represents . The main difference with the Latin orthography used for other Inuktitut dialects are the following letters: * â = aa * e = ii * o = uu * ĸ = q * ng, n̲g̲ or ngng = nng

Vocabulary comparison

The comparison of some animal names in the two dialects of

German loanwords

The German

loanword A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

s used in Inuttitut date from the period of the German missionaries of

(1760s). *''ailvat'' (< Ger. ''elf'') 'eleven' *''ainsik'' (< Ger. ''eins'') 'one o'clock' *''fiarâ'' (< Ger. ''vier'') 'four o'clock' *''Fraitâg'' ( < Ger. ''Freitag'') 'Friday' *''kâttopalak'' (< Ger. ''Kartoffel'') 'potato' *''Metvog'' (< Ger. ''Mittwoch'') 'Wednesday' *''Montâg'' (< Ger. ''Montag'') 'Monday' *''naina'' (< Ger. ''neun'') 'nine' *''sâksit'' (< Ger. ''sechs'') 'six' *''senat'' (< Ger. ''zehn'') 'ten' *''sepat'' (< Ger. ''sieben'') 'seven' *''silipa'' (< Ger. ''Silber'') 'coin' *''situnati'' (< Ger. ''Stunde'') 'hour' *''Sontâg'' (< Ger. ''Sonntag'') 'Sunday' *''Sunâpint'' (< Ger. ''Sonnabend'') 'Saturday' *''suvai'' (< Ger. ''zwei'') 'two' *''suvailva'' (< Ger. ''zwölf'') 'twelve' *''tarai'' (< Ger. ''drei'') 'three' *''taraitijik'' (< Ger. ''dreißig'') '30 odd 30 rifle and ammunition' *''Tenistâg'' (< Ger. ''Dienstag'') 'Tuesday' *''Tonistâg'' (< Ger. ''Donnerstag'') 'Thursday' *''viaga'' (< Ger. ''vier'') 'four' *''vogik'' (< Ger. ''Woche'') 'week'

Dialects

Alphabet

Vocabulary comparison

German loanwords

References

Further reading