Inuttitut Language Lesson #1 - Swearing

We begin our introduction to Inuttitut with swear words because this is an easy lesson to learn: there is no profanity in Inuttitut.

Individual words in Inuttitut in and of themselves are all respectable. Inuit do not blush when hearing body parts being named. Excreta in all forms is part of the daily dialogue, and the one of the words for wife has the same root as the sex act itself.

This doesn't mean that Inuit don't curse, and invectives are voiced daily around my household with a flourish of words honed to flense the skin off the object of scorn and coloured with a tone capable of delivering a vocal slap in the face. But unlike in western cultures, no single individual word is considered as obscene and a forbidden part of the Inuit vocabulary.

My mother tongue, however, is making in-roads in the Arctic as in most other parts of the globe. My children speak to each other almost exclusively in Inuttitut, but when push comes to shove, as it often does with five children, English creeps insidiously into their conversation as an effective insult-delivery option. With my younger kids, it's nerd and the dreaded wannabe. The latter has me scratching my head because it has morphed into something roughly equivalent of asshole rather than meaning cheap imitation. The older children are now getting their toes wet in hardcore English profanity with bitch, but then this word is almost mainstream now and used unabashedly in sitcoms and night-time dramas on television.

Older youth and adults will use fuck you and fuck off from time to time, either as a standalone phrase or the closing verbal punctuation of a sentence. On the other hand you'll rarely hear elders swear, even those whose command of English is pretty good. The reason for this is neither propriety nor politeness: they know that single words by themselves cannot adequately convey meaning.

But then, Inuttitut has no words at all, at least in the western sense of "word". However we'll leave that subject for a future posting.