A British academic is spending a year with an Inuit community to document their dying language and culture.
Dr. Stephen Pax Leonard, an anthropologist from Cambridge University, travels to Greenland this week. He begins the project in the far-northern town of Qaanaq, where he will learn the language. Most Inuit there speak Danish and Greenlandish as well as their native Inughuit language.
When he has mastered the tongue, he will move to a more remote Inughuit community.
Dr. Leonard predicts a challenging time, psychologically, as he will have to brave temperatures as low as -40 Celsius, and darkness from October to March.
Climate change will force the Inughuit out of their own communities and into larger towns within 10 to 15 years. They rely on hunting sea mammals for food, but thawing ice caused by global warming will soon make it impossible.
As a storytelling culture passed on orally, the Inughuit have documented little for posterity.
"Inughuit society has no established written literature, but it does have a very strong and distinctive, intangible cultural heritage," Dr. Leonard told Cambridge City News. "If their language dies, their heritage and identity will die with it. The aim of this project is to record and describe it and then give it back to the communities themselves in a form that future generations can use and understand."
The BBC notes that until explorer Sir John Ross arrived in 1818, the Inughuit believed they were the only people on Earth. Their name literally means "big people."
16 August 2010
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