Saturday, March 31, 2007

Nunavut language law

It sounds like Nunavut is aiming to be more assertive about language policy, according to this: A bill has been introduced that would enforce the use of Inuktitut in public places.

I happened across that while pondering whether to add a Google News feed for material on language to this blog. It would have a fair bit of extraneous material, but it might be fun to try for a while.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Considering the number of people that speak Dogrib etc I can under stand why they'd want that.It's mind boggling that a langauge can survive with so few speakers!

Anonymous said...

Like the Google feeds. Clicking it shows a very brief piece on dialect in the UP, the tone of which is very different than the WSJ piece.

Also, how about those Italians. Imagine the amount of time the mic would have to be off in Congress every time anyone with a noticeable accent took the floor. We'd never hear from Sen Feingold with his Janeville-speak, much less anyone except the honorable folk from Ohio and Iowa ... perhaps we should jump in and be the first to declare Upper Midwestern English to be the one and only official English!

Mr. Verb said...

Nice contrasts in these comments between US and Canada ... the former a place where some probably WOULD ban Feingold's fine dialect and the latter a place where Dogrib speakers should think about giving it its place in political life in the Northwest Territories if they haven't done it yet. (But it's not actually widely spoken in Nunavut, right, just NWT?)

I didn't mention it yesterday, but the Nunavut government site is worth checking out (quadrilingual): http://www.gov.nu.ca/.