Students will learn the basics of communication in Inuktitut

By Jane George

If you speak French, live near Quebec City and want to learn Inuktitut, there’s a course for you starting in January at Laval University.

The course, scheduled for Tuesday evenings, from 6:30 p.m. to 9:20 p.m., aims to introduce students to interacting in Inuktitut, both orally and in writing, in everyday life situations.

According to information from Laval, in the course, taught by Justyne Chamberland, you will learn how to:

introduce yourself or to introduce someone

ask simple questions to learn about a person or an object

understand the description of someone’s family members and briefly learn to describe the members of your family

understand feelings to describe one’s state of health and emotions, or the state of health of someone

understand the description of someone’s daily actions, inquire and describe your own daily actions

understand a weather report, learn about weather conditions and talk about the weather

You’ll also learn greetings and how to describe things along with dates and times, as well as the basic Inuktitut grammar to pull these together and the syllabics you will need to read and write in Inuktitut.

Chamberland first started learning Inuktitut when she was teaching French as a second language at Nunavik’s Raglan Mine a few years ago. Her students, who came from communities around the region, helped her learn Inuktitut, said Laval University spokesperson Thérèse Guay.

Chamberland was able to learn the two the dialects of Inuktitutspoken in Nunavik, those of the Hudson Bay and Ungava Bay, Guay said.

The course will be a mix of classroom sessions and distance-learning sessions, but all exams will take place at Laval.

The textbooks to be used in the course include: Conversation inuit/inuktitut uqariursautiit and Je veux que les inuit soient libres de nouveau by Taamusi Qumaq.

The deadline to enrol in “INU-1010 Initiation à l’inuktitut” is Dec. 2.

This course doesn’t mark the first time that Laval has offered Inuktitut courses: for many years, linguist and anthropologist Louis-Jacques Dorais taught Inuktitut.

You can also study Inuktitut in Montreal with linguist Georges Filotas, who teaches introductory and advanced courses at Nunavik’s Avataq Cultural Institute.