the last romance.

allthingslinguistic:

superlinguo:

In Canada, the Nunavut Official Languages Act came into force this month. This means the Inuit language will be given equal status to English and French, as official languages.

You can read more about this excellent recognition of Indigenous language here, at Language Magazine: 

“All three official languages will enjoy equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in territorial institutions — namely in the Legislative Assembly, the courts, and the departments of the government of Nunavut — and public agencies.”

In the previous piece of relevant legislation (now superceded), the Inuit language was considered secondary (alongside six other Aboriginal languages) to French and English.

Down here in Australia, I think it would be fantastic to see us move towards recognition of Aboriginal languages. A few months ago our friends over at Crikey.com’s Fully(Sic) blog talked about the current political climate of constitutional recognition of Australia’s first peoples and their languages. It’s interesting to note their take on Aboriginal languages being considered official (or “national”) languages - blog post here.

I mean, it’s great to see the Inuit language being recognized, but the language has been spoken in the area for thousands of years before Nunavut became a territory in 1999, as well as in the Northwest Territories and elsewhere in Northern Canada, so I can’t help but think this is a bit late. Not to mention all of the other Aboriginal languages that are spoken in Canada. Hopefully this is the first step of a broader trend.

The writing system in the stop sign above is Inuktitut syllabics, which is related to Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, used to write Cree, Oji-Cree, and Ojibwe. The basic principle is rotating a consonant symbol to reflect which vowel comes after it, as can be seen in the table below.