Nunatsiavummiut Dialect

The Nunatsiavummiut dialect, or Nunatsiavummiutut, called Inuttitut or Inuttut by its speakers, is a dialect of the Inuit language. It was once spoken across northern Labrador by Inuit people, whose traditional lands have now been consolidated as Nunatsiavut and Nunatukavut.

The language has a distinct writing system, created by German missionaries from the Moravian Church in Greenland in the 1760s. This separate writing tradition, the remoteness of Nunatsiavut from other Inuit communities, and its unique history of cultural contacts have made it into a distinct dialect with a separate literary tradition.

It shares features, including Schneider's Law, the reduction of alternate sequences of consonant clusters by simplification, with some Inuit dialects spoken in Quebec. It is differentiated by the tendency to neutralize velars and uvulars, i.e. /g/ ~ /r/, and /k/ ~ /q/ in word final and pre-consonantal positions, as well as by the assimilation of consonants in clusters, compared to other dialects. Morphological systems (~juk/~vuk) and syntactic patterns (e.g. the ergative) have similarly diverged. Nor are the Labrador dialects uniform: there are separate variants traceable to a number of regions, e.g. Rigolet, Nain, Hebron, etc.

Although Nunatsiavut claims over 4,000 inhabitants of Inuit descent, only 550 reported any Inuit language to be their mother tongue in the 2001 census, mostly in the town of Nain. Nunatsiavummiutut is seriously endangered.