Words in English from Native Languages

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Craig George. I’m a whale biologist living in Utqiagovic, Alaska, formerly Barrow.

Oh, cool. And I have lived here 40 years, and I’ve learned a lot of the names for the animals and the plants and the sea ice terms, those sorts of things. But I am surprised how many Inuit words, or Inupiaq in this case specifically, are in English. So my first question is, do you know how many, you’d say broadly Eskimo or Inuit terms or words are in English? And secondly, why do some words get incorporated into the English language and others not?

These are great questions. Yeah, these are really good. Let me ask you, so the Inupiat words that you were thinking of, what are some of those?

Well, like kayak, or the, you know, we say kayak, but kayak is how it’s pronounced here. Parka, mukluk, igloo.

So you’re talking about words that are very specific to that area and that culture, right? I mean, I think that’s a lot of the answer right there.

Right, yeah. So you’re looking at languages and contact. What is going to cross that barrier between two languages and two cultures?

Right. You can do a search in the Oxford English Dictionary in the language of origin field and the etymologies. And so you can put in words like Inuit and Yupik and Tlingit, or however you say that, T-L-I-N-G-I-T, I think is how it’s usually spelled. And it will tell you, it will come up with some entries. And it’s not that many that are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. I mean, there’s a lot of caveats and footnotes to make to that. 29 for Inuit, 3 for Yupik, and 5 for Tlingit, or Klingit, some people say it. And so it’s not that many.

Tlingit, yeah. It’s not that many, but what you can say, one thing is the OED isn’t specializing in these words. If you look in specific Canadian dictionaries, you will find more, because there is more contact there and there’s more everyday use of these terms. So that’s kind of what happens there. You have more in vocabulary because you have these specialized professions and you’re immersed in this contact situation and you are part of the community one way or the other. And so you’re going to learn these words where those of us in the lower 48 who don’t have that contact and only know it through reading or movies just simply aren’t going to have those words at all.

Right? I see. Yeah. But that’s surprising. So 29 words, though, in the Oxford Dictionary. Many of them are specialized. They have to do with the names of peoples, the names they’ve given themselves. Some of them have to do with very specific clothing items, stuff you would only know if you were studying the culture. There’s one other one that’s probably worth mentioning, malamute, which is also used to describe a group of people and then is later borrowed for the dog, which is said to have descended from the animals that those people used. You know, kind of a variety of husky, more or less.

This happens so much in English when we’re talking about very specific kinds of things, like a parka or something that you would wear in a certain place, or animals, as Grant mentioned. I mean, I’m thinking about the terms that we’ve adopted into very everyday English, like raccoon and opossum. Both of those come from Native American languages.

By the way, I wanted to talk about parka for a minute. Although it did come into English from the native languages of Canada and Alaska, it originally came from the native people of the Arctic Circle region of Russia. So it came from those people into Russian and then came into Alaska and Canada and then came to the native people there and then into English. So it’s had a long, long road that it’s traveled.

Good heavens. Yeah, that’s quite a migration.

Yeah, but what’s nice about that, if you know the history of the word parka, then you can see a little bit of the history of that part of the world.

Yeah, words meander all over the place, just like we are. In any case, there’s so much more to be said here. I know that we’re going to get a ton of calls about this from our Alaska listeners and our Canadian listeners. The final thing I want to say is kind of reinforce what Martha was saying about when we add words into the larger lexus of English, it’s usually because they fill a need. There’s a gap there.

And one of the things that happened to English, we have to mention the 1922 film Nanook of the North, which is where most of the English-speaking world first encountered the culture of the needed peoples up in the cold regions of North America. And admittedly, it wasn’t really a documentary and it was more fictionalized than true, but there were things like igloo in there and certain other terms that came out of that film and the hoopla surrounding the huge success of that film.

And doesn’t that mean polar bear?

Yes.

Yeah. I forgot to mention that term, but I wonder if people know that is the Inuit word for polar bear.

I doubt it.

Now they do. Now they do. Now they do.

Craig, thank you so much for calling.

How do you say thank you?

Koyanuk Puk. I mean, literally, thank you. The puck at the end means big, so thank you big.

Thanks a lot.

Koyanuk Puk?

Yes, that was good.

All right, take care now.

Thanks for calling. Call us again sometime, will you?

Love your show.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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