GJOA HAVEN, NUNAVUT—At first all you hear is the wind. Then the song on their breath.

In the chilly clear evening light, Marnie Ekelik and Shaina Nargyak are tossing their voices back and forth, weaving an eerily gorgeous throat-song tapestry.

They falter, shivering from the cold. The sound comes from here, says Marnie pointing at her neck. Surely she means her soul.

“She follows me,” she says, pointing a sleeve-covered fist at her friend.

“Like a dog growl,” says Shaina.

The 15-year-olds giggle and don’t know how to explain it, songs learned from elders, passed down through generations.

The language of Inuit music is alive in their voices on the tundra. But in their globalized world of smartphones and pop culture, Inuktitut — in all its dialects — is struggling.

I ask if they and their friends here, all junior Canadian Rangers, speak it. They grin: “To our elders, but not to each other.”

Dustin Atkichok, also 15, is summoned from a nearby tent. He speaks more fluently than his friends. He says he lives with his grandparents, who “taught me when I was a little baby boy.”

In front of a gaggle of his peers, Dustin is crushed by shyness, unwilling to demonstrate his fluency. I offer to demonstrate my basic Mandarin Chinese if he’ll speak to me. In a barely audible whisper, he agrees and speaks Inuktitut to his sister. But he admits he wishes more young people would use it.

Still, it’s a good news story, in part.

Among the approximately 60 aboriginal languages in Canada, Inuktitut, with all its variations, may be the most vibrant.

According to Statistics Canada data from 2011, nearly two in three Inuit (63%) said they could conduct a conversation in an aboriginal language (in their case, an Inuit language). That compares to 22 per cent of First Nations people and 2.5 per cent of Métis who were conversant in their aboriginal language. Still it’s a drop for the Inuit, down from 69 per cent in the 2006 census.

The Inuit population is growing and is younger than any other demographic in Canada; yet increasingly fewer of them claim an Inuit language as a mother tongue.

In Nunavut, where most of Canada’s Inuit live, 83 per cent of Inuit reported an aboriginal language as mother tongue in 2006. By 2011, that had slipped to 80 per cent.

The Nunavut government has passed two laws in its efforts to reverse the worrisome trend.

The Official Languages Act gives Inuit languages official status, along with English and French, in Nunavut courts, the legislative assembly and government institutions. The Inuit Language Protection Act aims to reinforce Inuit languages in education, work and daily life. It gives parents the right to have children educated in Inuktitut.

Since 2009, Inuktitut-language instruction in elementary schools has been available up to Grade 3. Instruction in all grades isn’t slated to be available until 2019.

Preserving Inuit languages is an uphill battle. Statistics Canada documents four different ones. The Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization that speaks for Inuit across Canada, suggests there may be six dialects across the north. Inuktitut is the most commonly spoken. It is primarily an oral language with no standardized writing system. In fact, there are two writing systems in use: syllabics (symbols that represent phonetic syllables) and the Roman alphabet.

A large 2011 study by the ITK said language is crucial to improving what remains a stubbornly dismal socio-economic picture. The ITK committee produced a National Strategy on Education, a blueprint for building Inuit-centred education systems across the north to “produce graduates equipped for the 21st century.”

It said reliable data is difficult to track down but concluded: “The stark reality of Inuit education today is that roughly 75 per cent of children are not completing high school, and many who do find that their skills and knowledge don’t compare to those of non-Aboriginal graduates.”

The study proposed major initiatives to engage and mobilize parents, boost the number of bilingual teachers, develop Inuit-centred curriculum and language resources, standardize the writing system, establish a northern university, and invest in early childhood programs to improve Inuit students’ chances for success.

Each community has its challenges. On King William Island, there’s a push on to train more local teachers.

“I think we’re making progress slowly but surely,” says Raymond Quqshuun Sr., chair of the Gjoa Haven education authority.

Quqshuun says Gjoa Haven’s two schools, elementary and high school, have more than 20 teachers, of whom “nine or 10” are Inuit. The rest come from the south. Right now, seven Inuit students are taking a teaching program at a local college. When they complete the training certificate, Quqshuun hopes they’ll be able to increase Inuktitut teaching in the community.

For parents, it’s a conundrum.

Kimberly Hiqiniq, a 23-year-old Gjoa Haven mother, attends a recent community welcome ceremony for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, watching a performance by Inuit dancers and singers — recorded on dozens of iPads and smartphones.

She rocks gently with her sleeping 11-month-old daughter Tianna-Rose on her back.

“Mostly I want her to try to speak Inuktitut because it’s important to our culture,” she says. “That’s what my parents and my grandparents were speaking when they were younger.”

But Kimberly speaks English to little Tianna-Rose. Asked why, she smiles: “Because she’s going to school, right?”

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She explains her daughter will have to switch in Grade 4 to English instruction, and Kimberly, like any parent, doesn’t want her child left behind.

In Rankin Inlet, another young mother, Natasha Kabvitok, 27, holds daughter Kierstin, 18 months old, as she explains that she speaks English and Inuktitut at home. Her eldest daughter, Maggie, 7, is taught in Inuktitut, but Hailey, 6, goes to English class, mistakenly registered by an aunt. Now there is no more room in the community’s Grade 1 class.

“There’s no space, they’re full classes. All the elementary spots are full,” says Natasha.

Sarah Arayuk taught Inuktitut-language kindergarten for 10 years before becoming principal at Leo Ussak Elementary School. She says schools can only do so much.

“We’re doing what we can but we need that support from parents and the community,” says Arayuk.

Asked what kind of support, she names homework programs, parents willing to spend even 15 minutes a day reading newspapers and magazines to children, or getting books from the public library. She adds there are websites where Inuktitut words are pronounced and written in syllabics, Roman orthography and English.

“It needs to come from the home. I’ve always believed in that.”

Francis Arayuk, 53, her husband, is a counsellor at the school who knows just how much home matters. He attended a residential school where he was punished for not speaking English. “They smacked us on the hand, for speaking our language,” he says. Now he proudly points to a class where Rankin Inlet’s children are reading aloud: in Inuktitut.

Not long after, the school bell rings and Inuit boys and girls pour into the playground. Their chatter is all in English, the lilting, staccato inflections of the English spoken in the north. School started here on Aug. 17.

Eve Aariak, the territory’s first languages commissioner and now Nunavut premier, believes anything is possible if resources are put into learning institutions and education.

Aariak grew up speaking only Inuktitut and is now fluently bilingual. She’s proud to say there are children in Nunavut who come from English-speaking homes who can converse in Inuktitut.

“More and more, in modern society, I think it has to be both: in the schools as well as home, and of course within the community. We need to see Inuit signs in the community so that we can be immersed in that.”

But Aariak is far from confident that the tide is anywhere close to turning.

“I am worried. We are not advancing as much as we should. We should be using Inuit language so much more. One of the reasons why Nunavut was created was because of culture and language and we need to develop that much further.”

Asked if there is a role for the federal government in preserving northern languages and culture, Aariak says absolutely: “The kind of financial resources and human resources we need in Nunavut are enormous and it has to be a collective effort.”

She hopes negotiations to devolve province-like controls over lands and non-renewable resources will give Nunavut the ability to advance its own priorities, including language, education and culture.

And she is clear about one thing: Ottawa doesn’t provide the same level of funding for Inuktitut that it does for French in Nunavut.

Back in Gjoa Haven, Raymond Quqshuun Sr. is also adamant that Ottawa should invest in preserving languages in the North.

“It’s very important that we have to take pride in our dialect and lifestyle up here in the north. I think it’s really unique and I think it’s really important to keep it because it’s linked to health of a community. Not only in the community but overall in the whole territories, and I think it’s important to Canada too.”