The town of Cape Dorset is situated on the south-western coast of Baffin Island.
It has a population of about 1150, and is renown throughout the world
for its Inuit prints. In fact, Cape Dorset is often called the Inuit
Art Capital of Canada.
During the course we dicussed at some length general issues in Field Linguistics, such as ethics, documentation and cultural sensitivity, but the bulk of our time was spent in practical elicittation of data. Our consultant was Oleekie (Lastname?), pictured below, who taught us a lot about Inuktitut, and was exceedingly patient with our awkward efforts at pronouncing and analysing her language.
During the 12 weeks of the course, we discovered a few interesting linguistic facts about the Cape Dorset variety of Inuktitut. These encompassed the phonology, and morphology/syntax. We lay these out below, together with examples of each of the phenomena. The examples below are provided in standard Inuit orthography (not syllabics) with the appropriate IPA given where necessary.
Our instructor was Prof Alana Johns, a linguist and scholar of Inuktitut. In addition to having researched the Inuktitut language for many years and produced a large body of academic work on the topic, she is also involved with community efforts at language maintanance. These include the Inuktitut Project, the Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut Dictionary Project, and International Polar Year.
The students in the course comprised both undergraduate and graduate
linguistics students at U of T. The students in the course also
produced term papers containing a lot of original data. Some of these
are provided below, beside each student’s name.
Phonology:
While most Inuktitut dialects in Canada use [j] for words like:
[niRijuŋa] ‘I am eating’
Cape Dorset differs in that speakers use the sound [z] instead:
[niRizuŋa] nirizunga ‘I am eating’
Names of Students |
Topic |
Link to Paper |
Liz Erhart |
Phonetics - Consonnant Clusters |
|
| Ailis Cournane | Syntax/Morphology - Passive Marking |
Last Updated: March 2008