Blogging in Inuktitut
By Cape Farewell // Tuesday 4 Sep // 20:04:15 // No Comments
Our challenge: Doriana blogging in Inuktitut
Doriana, from Victor Sammurtok School in Chesterfield Inlet (Igluligaarjuk), Nunavut, would like to blog in her native Inuktitut. This isn’t something we’ve tried before(!) but we’re doing our best to make it possible. As I researched the ins and outs of doing this, I found some interesting facts and links I thought I’d share…
Where is Inuktitut used?
Nunavut is a huge, sparsely populated territory in the far north of Canada where the majority of the inhabitants are Inuit. Inuktitut is spoken as a first language by about 85% of this population. According to Wikipedia “The Canadian census estimates that there are roughly 30,000 Inuktitut speakers in Canada, including roughly 200 who live regularly outside of traditionally Inuit lands.” The Inuktitut language is written in different ways in different places, but Inuktitut syllabary is the writing system used by Inuit people in Nunavut.
Viewing Inuktitut
In order to display syllabic Inuktitut characters, you must have a font on your computer that contains these characters. When no syllabic Inuktitut font is present (or you’re using the wrong Inuktitut font) the text will appear as question marks, rectangles, or as meaningless combinations of Roman letters, numbers and punctuation. If you have Inuktitut fonts installed on your computer you should be able to see the following text.
wk4tg5 ttCsy6 wm4+fg6 w]m|A6+X wm4+fg6 w]m6+X wm6 wEUJ6 w7mg6 jDi6 w]m|A6+X
Get a free Inuktitut font
There are different ways of displaying Inuktitut on websites, but our site isn’t handling Unicode very well at the moment, so we’re sticking with Legacy (Non-Unicode) fonts for now. If you can’t see a line of interesting characters above then you don’t have the right font yet. Download the Nunacom font below (Non-Unicode Inuktitut font).
Download Nunacom »
Online Inuktitut dictionaries and translations
I don’t know how good they are (we’ll have to wait to ask Doriana) but here’s a few links to some interesting tools.
Online translator »
Nunavut Living Dictionary »
Inuktitut Computing (useful links) »
