Webinar | What Inuktitut teaches us about Inuit zoology and botany

'What Inuktitut teaches us about Inuit zoology and botany,’ a fascinating foray into the heart of Inuit knowledge and classifications of living things by LOUIS-JACQUES DORAIS, anthropologist and linguist. 

NOTE: This presentation is in French

Original broadcast date: November 7, 2025.

Summary of the presentation
What Inuktitut teaches us about Inuit zoology and botany
Morphosemantic analysis of Inuktitut words for animals and plants—that is, identifying and translating the linguistic elements that make up these words—can teach us a great deal about how the Inuit observe and classify living things. For example, we will see that in Nunavik Inuktitut, animals are divided into six broad classes, each with a term that generally describes its relationship to its habitat. We will also see that the names of certain species highlight a major feature of their appearance or behavior, while implicitly suggesting that their raison d'être is to be caught by those who deserve it. Plants, or "pieces of soil that grow," are often named for their taste. Taking these meanings into account can give biologists, zoologists, and botanists new insights into how the Inuit view living beings and their relationships with them.

Speaker's biography 
 graduate in anthropology and linguistics, Louis-Jacques Dorais taught for nearly 40 years in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval and has been professor emeritus since 2014. For nearly 40 years, he was responsible for an introductory course in Inuktitut. 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 taken an interest in community organisation and identity issues among the Inuit, as well as among the Vietnamese diaspora, the Huron-Wendat and the Francophone minority in North America.