DORAIS, Louis-Jacques, 2010 The Language of the Inuit: Syntax, semantics and society in the Arctic, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 396 pages.

Anyone who works on the Eskimo-Aleut languages professionally (linguists, translators, language teachers, etc.) should buy this book. Anyone who does research or policy affecting the north should also buy it, even if they study only ice. In addition, I would recommend it to all Canadian families. This book won the 2011 Canada Prize in the Humanities, an outstanding honour and exceptionally rare for a book on the topic of language. The book reaps the benefits of a lifetime of involvement with the language through research, personal experience (Dorais speaks it fluently), and keen interest in the work of others in this area. It is an encyclopaedia of the Inuit language, encompassing everything from language history to dialect differences, grammar, writing systems, statistics of use, and so on. Like any encyclopaedia, it will not tell you everything but will tell you enough to get a basic understanding of a topic and where to read more if you are interested. Ideally this book will soon be available as an e-book because it is difficult to carry a hard-covered book around on northern trips. An e-book would also be searchable. Louis-Jacques Dorais is Canada’s foremost academic authority on the Inuit language, and this book is clearly a labour of love and an example for the future. In it he details as much as possible about the language, at the same time showing that the language has lost a considerable number of speakers in a number of regions over recent decades, a direction which could, but need not, lead to significant loss of the language. The book has a very beautiful cover with a summer ice photo of a family leaving on or coming back from a boat trip near Quaqtaq, Nunavik (Arctic Québec). One might think that this book is quite accessible, looking at the photo and the flap quote from Michael Fortescue stating that it is designed for a “broad audience.”. Be forewarned, however; the book will be challenging for non-linguists, Inuit and non-Inuit alike. Rather than reading the whole book through from cover to cover, novices should pick and choose topics that either interest them especially or are not difficult for non-specialists. For example, Chapter 9 surveys the current status of the Inuit language through statistics from a number of census sources. This being said, no other book even begins to approximate the wealth of information it contains about one of the Arctic’s most internationally known languages. Unfortunately, the first chapter is not one of the easier ones. Although the title of the book is The Language of the Inuit, the first chapter aims to situate the Inuit language within its wider language family (Eskaleut) and to convince the reader that its cousin languages (Aleut and Yupik) are systematically similar. A reader not already familiar with an Inuit dialect may not feel prepared to appreciate the similarities between Central Alaskan Yup’ik, a member of the Yupik family, and South Baffin, a member of the Inuit family. In this chapter I encountered an orthographic symbol I had never seen before. This is & which I finally figured out is the italicised version of the ampersand & in some font, possibly Adobe Garamond. & is the symbol used in the Central Arctic (see Table 3 p. 181) to represent the sound of the voiceless lateral fricative [ɬ], which is found in many dialects of the Inuit language. I hope that in the next edition the symbol will be more familiar. The second chapter discusses the Inuit language family as a whole. The family includes four major dialect groups: Inupiaq, Western Canadian Inuktun, …