In July, 2002, I posted a short writeup about the movie Atanarjuat, where I said that the movie was entirely in the Inuit language. A knowledgeable friend wrote me to say that I was wrong and Atanarjuat is not performed in Inuit at all but in Inuktitut.
I posted a footnote, now peeled off and moved to this node. According to the Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com), Inuktitut is a general name for one of several subgroups of Inuit. The movie may well be in some form of Inuktitut, though it's interesting that the official website does not mention this anywhere prominently. (http://www.atanarjuat.com/) The story is referred to there as an Inuit legend, and there are many references to Inuit actors, Inuit culture, etc. Perhaps they feel it is more meaningful to use a broader ethnic name than a highly specific and little-known linguistic name.
Those words of mine elicited comments from Gritchka, who has already contributed a writeup about Inuktitut:
Inuit are the people and Inuktitut is the language: both are generally used as synonyms for 'Eskimo'. But Eskimo has numerous dialects, and the names Inuit/Inuktitut are from one of them. Others are Yupik, Innut, etc. But as we usually don't want to get into this detail and just want to refer to Eskimos, but more politely, these two words are commonly used for the whole range.
And Ethnologue are too hung up on hierarchical classification, and need to coin names for every branch in their system. Their exact use of a name or level often doesn't bear too much scrutiny, though they're the best reference site out there for it.
Ethnonyms are indeed a tricky business, for they illustrate one of humankind's most fascinating phenomena: the drawing of boundaries marked by cultural and linguistic tokens, the meaning of which different demarcated groups do not always agree on. A
Linguist List discussion in 1991 (posted at http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/linguist/issues/5/5-1239.html) has Anthony Woodbury, an Eskimo specialist, writing as follows:
"Central Alaskan Yupik (or just Yup'ik Eskimo) ... is spoken by about 13,000 people in the coast and river areas of Southwestern Alaska from Norton Sound to Bristol Bay. It is one of five Eskimo languages. Of these five, probably the best-known is Inuit, spoken in a series of well-differentiated dialects ranging from Northern Alaska, all across the Canadian far north, and up to the coast of Greenland.
While the term Inuit is preferred to Eskimo by many in Canada, the term is retained here because (a) it properly refers to any Eskimo group, not only the Inuit; and (b) its use is widespread in Native communities in Alaska.I think I will leave the matter here, for someone else to pick up if they like.