Preservation
English has in recent years become the common language of the Inuvialuit. Surveys of Inuktitut usage in the NWT vary, but all agree that usage is not vigorous. According to the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre, only some 10% of the roughly 4,000 Inuvialuit speak any dialect of Inuvialuktun, and only some 4% use it at home. Statistics Canada's 2001 Census reports 765 self-identified Inuvialuktun speakers out of a self-reported Inuvialuit population of 3,905.
With only a few hundred speakers and already divided into diverse dialects, Inuvialuktun's future appears bleak.
Read more about this topic: Inuvialuk Language
Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men’s preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men’s wills such as men would have them.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“It is my hope to be able to prove that television is the greatest step forward we have yet made in the preservation of humanity. It will make of this Earth the paradise we have all envisioned, but have never seen.”
—Joseph O’Donnell. Clifford Sanforth. Professor James Houghland, Murder by Television, just before he demonstrates his new television device (1935)
“Is not our role to stand for the one thing which means our own salvation here but with which it will also be possible to save the world, and with which Europe will be able to save itself, namely the preservation of the white man and his state?”
—Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966)