Inuktut texting now available for iPhone, but many languages still missing

Whether it’s a quick one word response or a long conversation that could have ended with a five minute phone call, gone are the days when we use our cell phones for having spoken conversations. Sending a text message has become as commonplace as drinking your morning cup of coffee or brushing your teeth at the end of the day. But, what if you couldn’t get across your message because it simply wasn’t available?

For many iPhone users in Canada, being able to write a quick text in your mother tongue is something we take for granted. But for some who live in Nunavut, it has been a very different story – until recently.

Speakers of Inuktut may now be feeling the bliss of being able to write a quick text in their mother tongue. A new app, ‘Naqittautit’ was launched last week which allows iPhone and iPad users to add additional keyboards to their device to type in three different dialects; Kiputtlijjut, Quaniujaaqpait and Qaliujaaqpait. These keyboards allow for symbolic Inuktut characters or Roman Orthography to be used in every day text or social media.

This app can be easily downloaded and added with a few simple swipes, and costs users nothing to add to their phone or devise.

Many of Canada’s most widely-spoken languages are already available on iPhones and iPad and do not need to be manually added to devises. If you generally send your texts in English, Canadian French, Chinese, Spanish, German or even Urdu, to name a few, your chosen keyboard is already preloaded to your Apple device.

But, what if your first language is Punjabi, Persian, Cantonese, Mandarin or Tagalog? Well, you might be in the same boat as those who prefer to text in the Naqittautit app. These languages are not available in Canada without being downloaded as an additional keyboard, some even at a cost.

Naqittautit was released through the Government of Nunavut and the Pirurvik Centre, a non-profit government organization, with the aim to help keep the Inuit language alive. They say they feel very strongly that not having their keyboard available to users makes their language less visible on social media.

In a society where not being current on social media is like showing up late to a party in your underwear, the people of Nunavut realized they need to be seen and heard on social media to keep younger generations engaged and enriched by their language.

One can only hope that sometime in the not-so-distant future, we see all of these languages available to iPhone and iPad users without having to add additions to their devices. We can also hope that our devices keep up to us when it comes to change and adapting to our bustling and ever-growing Canadian culture.