Western Nunavut’s Inuit languages need support, KIA hears – Nunatsiaq News
October 15, 2014
Kitikmeot Inuit Association AGM delegates say use at home is fading
CAMBRIDGE BAY — Concern about the poor state of their Inuit languages in western Nunavut kept delegates to the Kitikmeot Inuit Association annual general meeting in Cambridge Bay talking around the table late into the evening Oct. 14.
Inuinnaqtun in the western part of the Kitikmeot region is waning — in 2012, as few as 77 people spoke the language in Cambridge Bay.
And, according to figures shared at the KIA meeting, the region’s other dialect, Netsilingmiutitut, is also eroding in the eastern part of the Kitikmeot.
Between 1996 and 2006 there was a “dramatic language loss in the home” — in Kugaaruk from 47 per cent to 23 per cent, in Gjoa Haven from 29 per cent to 15 per cent and in Taloyoak from 33 per cent to 20 per cent.
