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3 Inuit Sign Language
In the following sections, some background information on IUR will be provided and the methodology will be described.
3.1 Background
next sectionInuit Sign Language is a language of the Inuit people. It is possible that IUR is used from Greenland to Alaska, as these are regions where the Inuit people live, but this hypothesis has yet to be confirmed. In the current descriptive project, the focus is on Nunavut, Canada’s Arctic territory (see Figure 4), where the sign language is used by an estimated 47 people (MacDougall 2000). Although Nunavut encompasses almost two million km2, it has less than 30,000 inhabitants (Canadian Census 2006). Most of the people (85%) are Inuit, and it is from their language, Inuktitut, where Nunavut ‘our land’ got its name in 1999. Nunavut is thinly populated and the population is geographically spread. There is contact between communities, but it does not occur regularly because of the distances involved. In the past, the Inuit lived a nomadic life, travelling across the Arctic. When nomadic life was abandoned, the extensive contact between people from different regions decreased considerably, as people from different backgrounds settled in the same community (Condon 1983; Wachowich 1999). Contact between deaf native IUR signers was also reduced as it became practically limited to those who happened to live in the same community. Due to decreased contact between IUR signers, the sign language is now endangered.
It is estimated that the prevalence of deafness in Nunavut is 5.7/1000, a percentage that is almost six times higher than in southern Canada (Stamos-Destounis 1993; MacDougall 2000). Deaf individuals have been identified in many of Nunavut’s communities, and many of them use a form of sign language. Those who use sign language are generally surrounded by a network of family and friends who use sign language, too. MacDougall (2000:13) found “little or no evidence of “social stigma” associated with deafness in the communities […] and there was no apparent social exclusion because of deafness”.
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Figure 4 |
The sign language used varies from a mix of ASL and Manually Coded English (MCE) to pure IUR (MacDougall 2000). The use of ASL/MCE as opposed to IUR is mainly related to the degree of formal education. Those aged between 20 and 50 who went to school have been to residential schools for the deaf in southern Canada where ASL/MCE was used. Some of these people do know some IUR signs, but do not use the language regularly. Deaf Inuit children nowadays attend the regular school in their home community, with the aid of a qualified ASL interpreter, and do not know IUR. This is a major contributing factor to the endangerment of IUR. In fact, IUR is only used as a primary language by those deaf individuals who have not been to school, or only for a short period. Data collection is aggravated by the fact that these people are spread out across many different communities in Nunavut.
3.2 Methodology
In the following section, preliminary results from fieldwork conducted by the first author in 2009 and 2010 in Baker Lake and Rankin Inlet (see Figure 4) will be presented. Five deaf Inuit live in each of these communities, but most of them use ASL/MCE.
3.2.1 Participants
In Rankin Inlet, the data were collected from two deaf men and one hearing woman. PU is in his early forties and bilingual in IUR and ASL/MCE. He has three deaf and five hearing siblings. The language used in the family is a combination of ASL, MCE, and fingerspelling. PU learned IUR from the age of 12 from YS, a man in his late sixties who grew up with a deaf brother, and about five hearing siblings. YS is monolingual in IUR, but as he and PU have been friends for over 25 years, he has learned some fingerspelling and now uses some ASL signs. Both men are skilled artists and work in a ceramic workshop. The hearing informant SS, the wife of YS, was only able to take part in two recording sessions.
In Baker Lake, the data comes from one deaf and one hearing man, both in their early forties. BS was deafened at the age of seven and therefore acquired Inuktitut and English as first languages. From the age of seven he learned IUR, which is now his main means of communication. He does not use spoken or written Inuktitut and English. He has no deaf relatives. Since the late 1990s, BS has also learned some ASL/MCE, and some IUR signs have now been replaced by their ASL counterparts. DK is a hearing friend of BS, and has been using IUR with him since they were in their mid-teens. DK also speaks Inuktitut and English. An overview of the participants’ characteristics is provided in Table 1.
3.2.2 Data collection
Recording in Rankin Inlet was all done in the large kitchen of Kivalliq Hall, the campus building of Nunavut Arctic College. In Baker Lake, recording took place either in the home of one of the two informants or in the apartment where the researcher was staying. The researcher was present during all recording sessions. Both spontaneous and elicited data were recorded. The spontaneous data come from an unstructured interview setting. The researcher usually asked some prompting questions about Inuit culture. This led the informants to narrate stories about past and present life. In Rankin Inlet, the monolingual informant YS was dominant in the conversation.
Table 1. IUR study: Participants’ characteristics | |||||
|
location |
subject |
gender |
age |
deaf relatives? |
languages |
|
Rankin Inlet |
PU |
male |
early 40s |
3 deaf siblings |
IUR, ASL/MCE |
|
YS |
male |
late 60s |
deaf brother |
IUR | |
|
SS |
female |
late 50s |
--- |
IUR, Inukt., En. | |
|
Baker Lake |
BS |
male |
early 40s |
--- |
IUR (Inukt., En.) |
|
DK |
male |
early 40s |
--- |
IUR, Inukt., En. | |
For the elicitation, picture and video materials were used. The video material consisted of clips of Canary Row depicting various efforts of Sylvester the Cat to catch Tweety the Bird. Both cat and bird are personified and walk and talk like human beings. In previous studies on various sign languages, these clips have been successfully used for the elicitation of motion verbs, classifier constructions, and the use of space. The task’s design is that the signer watches the clip, then recounts the story to the addressee, i.e. the other IUR signer. In both Rankin Inlet and Baker Lake, the signer started signing while the clip was still running, probably because the clips are rather long to remember (23 seconds for the shortest clip, 1:15 for the longest).
Another elicitation task was designed to elicit sentences with the verbs give and/or take, thereby focusing on person agreement and classifiers. A short clip was shown in which three persons are visible; one of them gives something to or takes something from one of the others. Objects given (or taken) include a rose, a notebook, a red and a white light bulb. Interestingly, the informants in Baker Lake omitted the object in all sentences they produced and showed some variation in the handshapes of the verb. In Rankin Inlet, the white bulb was taken to be an ice-cream cone, and the red bulb was seen as some object. Obviously, it was not clear to the signers what this object was, possibly due to a vision problem (glaucoma) of one of the signers.
The Volterra Picture task (Volterra et al. 1984) was used to elicit word order and/or agreement. A selection was made of six images. Only the data from Rankin Inlet has thus far been transcribed and is available for the present study.
In 2009, the bilingual informant PU translated what the monolingual informant signed into MCE for the researcher, and this was also recorded on video. In 2010, a translation for stories signed in IUR was no longer necessary in most cases, as the researcher understood most of the IUR stories of YS. In Baker Lake, the bilingual informant DK translated what the monolingual informant BS signed into English for the researcher. During both fieldwork trips, the translation was necessary, as the researcher was not able to understand all of the IUR of BS. This was due to a rather short first visit in 2009, caused by financial limitations.
During the two fieldwork trips, about 21 hours of material have been recorded, which also include the translations in 2009. Data presented in the following section comes from a total of two hours that have been translated and glossed, including data from the elicitation tasks described above.