Lingo24 Company Blog

After yesterdays look at the extinction of the Eyak language; aided in no small measure by its active discouragement in the 20th century, it is heartening to be able to see the opposite side of the coin in relation to the Inuit language; Inuktitut.

The heartland of the Inuit people is Nunavut, an area of land two to three times the size of France and Alaska; in 1999 the Canadian authorities gave the native residents leave to administer their home area as they deemed fit. Within Nunavut, there are around 25 communities containing some 30,000 people and very little in the way of roads…in fact, there are none at all!

You would suppose then that communication, especially inter-Inuit cultural communication, would be very difficult under these circumstances; and so it has proved…until now. New developments on the internet, it seems, are heralding a renaissance in the Inuit language and culture.

It seems that Inuktitut speakers will soon be able to establish a web presence, as the Inuit language goes online. In the past, web browsers could not support Inuktitut; however, attavik.net has remedied this problem; it provides a content management system that allows native speakers to write documents, manage their file structure and offer online payments in the Inuit language.

For the Inuit language this could very well prove the catalyst for keeping the language alive in Nunavut’s remote and harsh environment; the Nunavut Government’s, long stated goal has been to make Inuktitut the region’s working language and with this development, their goal is one large step closer to fruition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.