UQTR–INQ Lunchtime Lecture | What Inuktitut Teaches Us About Inuit Zoology and Botany

INQ and UQTR are pleased to invite you to a lunchtime lecture featuring Mr. Louis-Jacques Dorais, anthropologist and linguist.

When: November 7, 2025, 12:00–1:30 p.m.
Where: Passerelle, Health Pavilion (3rd floor), UQTR campus, or via Zoom

Presentation Summary

What Inuktitut Teaches Us About Inuit Zoology and Botany (Prensentation in French) / Ce que l’inuktitut nous apprend sur la zoologie et la botanique inuit

The morphosemantic analysis of words designating animals and plants in Inuktitut - that is, the identification and translation of the linguistic elements that make up each word - can provide valuable insights into how Inuit observe and classify living beings. For example, in Nunavik Inuktitut, animals are divided into six broad classes, each named with a term that generally reflects the class’s relationship to its habitat. Some species names highlight a defining feature of the species’ appearance or behavior, while implicitly suggesting that the very purpose of the species is to be caught by those who deserve it. Plants - considered “pieces of earth that grow” - are often named for the sensations one experiences when tasting them. Attending to these meanings can offer biologists, zoologists, and botanists new perspectives on how Inuit perceive the living beings around them and how they interact with them.

Speaker Biography

Louis-Jacques Dorais, anthropologist and linguist, taught in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval for nearly 40 years and has been Professor Emeritus since 2014. For almost four decades, he was responsible for an introductory Inuktitut course at Université Laval. Since his first fieldwork as a student in Nunavik in 1965, his research has focused primarily on the semantics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics of the Inuit language. He has also explored issues of community organization and identity among Inuit, as well as among members of the Vietnamese diaspora, the Huron-Wendat Nation, and francophone minorities in North America.

Some of his publications:

• La Parole inuit (1996)
• Être huron, inuit, francophone, vietnamien... Propos sur la langue et l’identité (2010)
• The Language of the Inuit (2010)
• Quaqtaq, terre de la grande banquise (2017)
• Words of the Inuit (2020)

Photo: Barbara Vuillaume