Elisapie's Juno-nominated album: Promoting Inuktitut through music

Yahoo

29-03-2025

Singer Elisapie's fourth album, Inuktitut, has been nominated for album of the year at the 2025 Juno Awards being held this weekend in Vancouver.
The album features covers of 10 pop and classic rock songs, including the Rolling Stones's 'Wild Horses' and Metallica's 'The Unforgiven,' re-imagined in Inuktitut. Inuktitut is the first language of 33,790 Inuit in Canada, according to the 2021 Census.
Elisapie's nomination offers a good opportunity to reflect on the situation of Inuktitut and how creative work, including music, helps promote it.
Our work touches on the inter-generational transmission of Inuktitut. We share perspectives as a Qallunaaq (non-Inuk) linguist (Richard) and as an Inuk school teacher (Sarah) in Nunavik, with Sarah's personal experiences in the community highlighted.
Together, we have co-taught courses for Inuit teachers in Puvirnituq and Ivujivik. We are also both affiliated with a research group focused on Indigenous education based at Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue.
Sarah notes that:
I was amazed that [Elsipasie] could make the long words in Inuktitut fit with the rhythm of the music; she did it so precisely. It took me back to the 1980s, when I was growing up. It would have been nice if songs like these had been interpreted back then. It's been a long time coming, but it shows that nothing is impossible. The songs sound so natural in Inuktitut.
On the day we talked about this story, Sarah remembered:
I was at the Snow Festival yesterday [in Puvirnituq], and some of the teenagers knew all the words to her songs and were singing along. We didn't have that when I was growing up.
She remembers first seeing Elisapie sing in the early 1990s at one of the first snow festivals in Puvirnituq.
Elisapie's album has also sparked interest outside of Canada, with stories in such venues as Rolling Stone, Vogue and Le Monde.
Beyond how Elisapie beautifully interprets the songs, creative choices like using throat singing on the first track, 'Isumagijunnaitaungituq (The Unforgiven),' and stunning music videos showcasing life in the North brings the language to a wider audience.
The album's cover art features the word Inuktitut, ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ, in syllabics — a writing system originally use for Cree and adapted to Inuktitut, where the individual symbols represent consonants and the way they point represents vowels.
The word Inuktitut itself means 'like the Inuit,' and is the name for part of a wider language continuum spoken across the North American Arctic. This language continuum includes Iñupiaq in Alaska, Uummarmiutun, Sallirmiutun and Inuinnaqtun in the Western Canadian Arctic, Inuktitut in the Eastern Arctic, Inuttut in Labrador and Kalaallisut in Greenland.
This abundance of names reflects a diversity of varieties, each with their own pronunciations and differences in grammar and vocabulary stretching across Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit homeland.
Speakers in each community look to their Elders as models of how the language should be spoken. While this multiplicity of dialects poses challenges for translation and creating teaching materials, each variety marks local identity and links generations.
This diversity also fascinates linguists, as each variety attests to a different way of organizing the unconscious rules of grammar in the human mind.
For instance, Inuktitut has a rich system of tense markers on verbs, signalling events that just happened, happened earlier today, before today or long ago. Inuinnaqtun, to the west, lacks most of these tense markers, but instead allows more complex combinations of sounds.
Sarah stresses the importance of Elisapie's music for the language:
It's so impressive that people like Elisapie are doing such amazing things with the language. She grew up around the same time as me and when I was in school there were so few teaching materials in Inuktitut, and we focused more on speaking than reading and writing. Even if her main goal might not have been to promote the language, she's doing it, because kids listen to her. More teenagers are willing to sing in Inuktitut now because they have role models like her and Beatrice Deer.
Deer is an Inuk and Mohawk musician from Quaqtaq, Nunavik, who also sings in Inuktitut, as well as English and French.
In Canada, all levels of government have failed to provide adequate access to education in Indigenous languages, even in regions where Indigenous Peoples form the majority.
In Nunavik, where Elisapie is from, 90 per cent of the population (12,590 out of 14,050) identifies as Inuit and 87 per cent (12,245 out of 14,050) report Inuktitut as their first language. And yet Inuktitut is only the primary language of instruction up until Grade 3.
About promoting Inuktitut, Sarah says:
We're lucky that in most of the villages in Nunavik, the language is still strong. But it's still concerning that some people have started speaking in English to their kids. What we really need to promote it is to have school in Inuktitut from kindergarten to the end of high school [secondary 5 in Québec]. That's why a group of Inuit teachers, including me, visited Greenland to learn more about their education system. They've had schools in their language for almost 200 years. We just started in the '50s.
While bilingualism may bring economic benefits, the lack of support for Indigenous languages often results in a situation where bilingualism robs children of the chance to fully develop in their first language.
In addition to violating Indigenous Peoples' inherent right to get an education in their language (see the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), current education policies also go against recommendations of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
UNESCO recommends that Indigenous minority languages be taught as the primary language in school for the first six to eight years, as this has been shown to contribute to children's well-being and self-esteem.
Unfortunately, Canada's official language laws continue to place the two colonial languages of English and French above Indigenous languages, particularly in education funding.
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New challenges have also emerged for maintaining and extending the domains in which Inuktitut is used. Once cut off from high-speed internet, new satellite technology has brought access to more Inuit communities, along with new economic opportunities.
However, this connectivity also brings an avalanche of English content, from viral videos and streaming platforms to social networks and mobile games.
It is in this changing linguistic and media landscape where Inuktitut language and cultural production, like Elisapie's album, are vital for promoting Inuktitut.
Children and teenagers need content that speaks to them — things they see as new, fun, cool and representing their generation. This includes music, comic books, novels, video games and even Hockey Night in Canada in Inuktitut.
So whether Elisapie's music is being played in community radio stations, featured in an episode of CBC's North of North or streamed as a music video on social media, it serves the added role of taking up a little more space for Inuktitut in people's daily lives.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organisation bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Richard Compton, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Sarah Angiyou, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT)
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Richard Compton receives funding in the form of research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Transmission and Knowledge of the Inuit Language.
Sarah Angiyou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.