Social Features of IUR

Because only a small pool of IUR speakers currently exist, many social features we are familar with are not present in the language. For example, while in english speech between family will differ than between a boss and their employees, in linguist Joke Schuit’s research(2012), no discernable difference was found between usage directed to Schuit and that between participants1. There is not sufficient research to say whether IUR users in the past would have produced the language differently based on their gender. Kinship terms however are gender-neutral, though usually in their unmarked form refer to a male. Gender adjectives may be added to these terms to mark their gender(Schuit, 2014). Geographic location does effect production, with MacDougall(2000) finding 2/3s of certain lexical signs consistent up to minor variation between communities, with the final 1/3 distinct but intelligible.

Perhaps the most obvious language distinctions we deal with personally are age based. Unfortunately, all exclusive – and nearly all multilingual – IUR speakers are now over 50 years old (Schuit, 2012), so any generational shifts or changes in production when spoken between older and younger speakers are impossible to study. Instead, younger deaf Inuit speak almost exclusively ASL, with those elders which are able to speak ASL code switching when appropriate in order to communicate(Schuit, 2012). Even between older IUR users though ASL lexical signs are incorporated into the phonological system of ISL, including lexical borrowings for such basic vocabulary terms as BOY. HOME, and WATER. ISL speech also contains some interesting calques from Inuktitut, including the sign for ‘white man’, which breaks down the same way as in Inuktitut. (joke schuit, 2012) The context that code-switching and borrowing occurs in needs to be studied more.