Every time Johnassie Kudluarok hears his students use the word “maqaitu-ing” in Inuktitut, it admittedly drives him “nuts.”
“What does ‘maqaitu-ing’ mean? Where did that ‘-ing’ come from?” he wonders.
The word maqaitu means hunting in Inuktitut, but younger students tend to anglicize it, said Kudluarok, an Inuktitut teacher at Sanikiluaq’s Paatsaali High School.
But anglicisms like “maqaitu-ing” are just the beginning of the problem, adds Mary Kavik, who teaches Inuktitut and sewing at the school.
“Decline of the language starts at home,” she said.
“If you keep speaking it inside the house, they’re going to learn to just speak English and French.”
The number of native Inuktut speakers has been in decline for years. Census data show the proportion of Nunavummiut who reported their mother tongue as Inuktut fell to 52.9 per cent in 2021 from 61.9 per cent in 2016. And in 2001, it was 69.6 per cent, according to Statistics Canada.
The United Nations classifies most dialects of the Inuit language spoken in Canada as “vulnerable,” with Inuinnaqtun — the Inuit language of western Nunavut — as “definitely endangered.”
Things are not as bad in Sanikiluaq, where most young people are still able to express themselves in Inuktitut, but it’s getting worse, Kavik said.
Unlike today, her generation spoke Inuktitut at home and studied English at school. Now it’s the other way around for most families.
“I had unilingual parents. We got so lucky to be able to connect with them — English was never used or not even mixed with our language at home,” Kavik said.
Learning Inuktitut can be a tough sell to teenagers when most of what they see online is in English.
“I blame the iPhones,” Kudluarok said. “They watch TV, read Facebook — and all of it is in English”
Also, a lot of the teaching materials the Sanikiluaq school receives from the Department of Education in Iqaluit are not geared toward the local dialect.
“This doesn’t make sense at all to us,” Kudluarok said, pointing at the cover of an Inhabit Education book featuring a photo of a young girl with a spatula and pancakes and an Inuktitut word in syllabics as its title.
“From the picture, I guess it means ‘making pancakes,’ but I don’t know this word,” he said.
Still, Kudluarok said he is optimistic that the language can survive in the minds of young Inuit even during these over-anglicized times.
“If we keep correcting them — yes. If we keep encouraging them — yes,” he said.
“This is our heritage. I don’t want them to lose that.”
By Arty Sarkisian, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on Feb 10, 2026 at 07:55
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