Article content continued

The latest threat is the Internet’s homogenizing impact as the digital world demands fluency in digital languages.

The web’s lack of language diversity is well documented (only 500 languages from the world’s 7,000 are used online; Twitter supports just 61). Meanwhile, English accounts for half of the written text online, while only five per cent of people speak it at home.

For a language, online presence can mean the difference between survival and extinction. Around 40 per cent of languages are endangered, many with less than 1,000 speakers, and every two weeks another goes silent as the last speaker dies or Indigenous tongues are overwhelmed. The digital language divide is pushing more Inuit — and countless speakers of other languages — to English.

But that may be starting to change, thanks in part to initiatives like Inuktitut Ilinniaqta and shifts within the language itself.

Inuktut was historically a set of oral languages. Nine writing systems have been invented at various times by missionaries and other outsiders, meaning Inuit didn’t have ownership of their own alphabet. It also meant that Inuit from neighbouring towns couldn’t comprehend each other’s writing systems. This, partly, explains why translating textbooks has been so expensive and why many young Inuit still use English to send texts despite apps that run Inuit-language keyboards.

In 2019, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national Inuit organization, created a unified writing system that works across all dialects. Created for Inuit, by Inuit, it’s a landmark in decolonizing the alphabet — and a welcome one for those behind Inuktitut Ilinniaqta.