Nonetheless, a brand new language has began spreading quickly. “Lately we’ve been seeing an enormous inflow of English,” Grenoble mentioned. Latest immigrants and non permanent staff sometimes use English. Additionally, younger persons are studying English via motion pictures, video video games, social media and YouTube.
“My analysis goals to grasp what is going on on this dynamic state of affairs each linguistically and sociolinguistically,” Grenoble mentioned. “Who speaks which language when and with whom? How are Greenlanders studying English and what impact does this have on their information and use of Kalaallisut, their mom or ancestral tongue?”
To reply these questions, Grenoble and venture postdoc Jessica Kantarovich spent a lot of the summer season in Nuuk, Greenland observing how individuals use Kalaallisut. They had been significantly excited by reviews that the language was getting shorter.
“Kalaallisut is a polysynthetic language; suffixes tackle the job that phrases do in languages like English,” Grenoble mentioned. “For instance: the phrase qujanaq is ‘thanks’. In case you add the suffix -rsuaq, which suggests ‘huge’, you get qujanarsuaq, ‘huge thanks’ or ‘thanks very a lot.’ And in case you are actually, actually grateful, you may add it once more: qujanarsuarsuaq, and once more, qujanarsuarsuarsuaq, and so forth.”
To determine if and the way phrases had been getting shorter, Grenoble and Kantarovich performed, transcribed, and analyzed interviews in Kalaallisut. They had been additionally within the language’s on a regular basis use.
“We normally spend a while doing participant-observation work, going to public locations and observing who’s utilizing what language within the shops, within the eating places, in informal and transient interactions,” Grenoble mentioned.
The students are significantly excited by what Grenoble calls shifting audio system—sometimes younger individuals nonetheless of their homeland who cease studying their dad and mom’ minority language and shift to the bulk one.
