How Iqaluit's learning institute gave a generation of Inuit adults a path back to Inuktut
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How Iqaluit's learning institute gave a generation of Inuit adults a path back to Inuktut

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 30, 202654 min
  • Documentary
  • Language learning
  • About Canada

Younger generations in Nunavut today are less likely to grow up immersed in Inuktut. At a language school in Iqaluit, Inuit adults who didn’t grow up speaking Inuktut now have the chance to learn it as a second language at the Pirurvik Centre. By learning the words for kinship terminology, they’re also discovering things about their families they never knew. *This episode is the first in a two-part series on language revitalization. It originally aired on March 24, 2025.

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Those were needs.

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B2 · Upper-intermediate

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A1 30%A2 36%B1 18%B2 14%C1 2%
  • 84% of the words are B1 or easier.
  • 150 words a minute: a natural pace.
  • 157 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.

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0:56

But then I saw all these hands up in the air as well. Those were needs. Those hands belonged to generations of Inuit who were hungry for language. And the facility she dreamed of was a center in Iqaluit dedicated to assuaging that hunger.

1:18

I sketched what I signed my dream the very next morning upon waking up. I guess it was a sign that I got it imprinted in me even stronger, because it haunted me. I decided to sketch a bigger facility in 1997, only because I kept playing around with, you know, this dream and I would expand it and I saw it all in color and I would be inside

1:53

the facility. I just imagine so much of it. She wrote a mission statement telling the story of the center, a center that still lived only in her imagination.

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