Iqaluit (July 10/06) - Whether senior bureaucrats will be dismissed if they don’t grasp Inuktitut is still in question.

“We’ll see when we get there,” was Premier Paul Okalik’s response when asked about their job security in an interview with News/North last week.

Johnny Kusugak, Languages Commissioner of Nunavut, is responsible for monitoring government progress on making Inuktitut its working language. “I tip my hat to the premier for this announcement,” he said of the government’s directive that compels senior bureaucrats to take Inuktitut lessons. - photo courtesy of the Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut An Inuktitut primer: Seventy per cent of Nunavummiut speak Inuktitut as their first language, according to the Office of the Languages Commissioner. However, there are numerous dialects. There is also debate over whether Inuinnaqtun is its own language or a dialect of Inuktitut. Sometimes two Inuit people who speak different dialects will choose to converse in English rather than struggle to understand each other’s different terms, the Commissioner’s Office stated in a recent report. The government and the schools are challenged with how to accommodate the variety of dialects when providing materials and information to students and the public. There are a number of resources available to those learning Inuktitut, but no exhaustive dictionary that takes all dialects into account. “That is for some up-and-coming researcher to do,” former Languages Commissioner Eva Aariak said of the task. One guide is the Inuktitut Living Dictionary, which is available via the Internet. Users can type in a word and get a translation in English, French or Inuktitut (syllabics or Roman orthography).

Okalik surprised some when he announced in the legislature last month that deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers must learn the Inuit language.

“We are going to make sure that our employees are able to speak Inuktitut by 2008,” he told ministers and MLAs during the Nunavut Leadership Forum on June 6.

Already struggling to fill vacant positions, the government’s recruitment efforts won’t be further hindered by the Inuktitut policy, Okalik contended.

“I don’t believe so. It complements our goal of having 85 per cent Inuit workforce,” he said.

Okalik said senior bureaucrats were ordered to learn the language because it’s “very visible” for the rest of the public service.

“We have to start some place,” he said. “When we see non-Inuit making efforts to learn our language, they have a special status in our communities.”

Johnny Kusugak, Nunavut’s Languages Commissioner, said Okalik’s Inuktitut decree “is like music to my ears.”

“It’s exactly the way the government has to move forward if we’re going to reach our goal in 2020,” Kusugak said, referring to the government’s objective to make Inuktitut its working language by that decade.

The Inuktitut directive may eventually apply to all government employees, but Okalik wouldn’t confirm that last week.

That prospect hasn’t created much buzz within the union, according to Doug Workman, president of the Nunavut Employees Union.

“Yeah, that’s a dream. It’s nice that we should all be speaking Inuktitut up here,” he said, adding that issues such as housing, Inuit employment and an adequate employment equity plan are a greater priority right now.

“The (nursing) course isn’t taught in Inuktitut. You can’t suck and blow when you’re offering a course like that for a front-line position... there’s a long ways to go,” said Workman.

Regardless, senior bureaucrats have enroled in specially arranged Inuktitut language classes, as directed.

The government refused Nunavut News/North’s repeated requests to attend a single government-sponsored Inuktitut session for the purposes of this article.

Kusugak conceded that the ideal way to learn to speak the Inuit language is through immersion, particularly with unilingual Inuktitut speakers. Yet with the resources being made available to the senior bureaucrats, he said they should be able to grasp the basics.

“To me that’s a stepping stone,” he said.