ith the signs of spring all around me, and my dreams of soon being able to get out on the land again, in season to go berry picking with fellow Inuit women, it’s perhaps not surprising that my thoughts have turned to the place of nature in Inuit life. In our language we have no word for ‘nature’, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world. The division the Western world likes to make between ‘man and nature’ is both foreign and dangerous in the traditional Inuit view. In Western thinking, humans are set apart from nature; nature is something to strive against, to conquer, to tame, to exploit or, more benignly, to use for ‘recreation’. By contrast, Inuit place themselves within, not apart from, nature. This ‘in-ness’ is perfectly symbolized in our traditional dwellings of the past: illuvigait (snow houses) in winter and tupiit (sealskin tents) in summer. What could be more within nature than living comfortably in dwellings made of snow and sealskin!

Here, our language, Inuktitut – ultimately a language of the land – reclaims its rightful place.

It is now early June – the beginning of springtime in the Arctic, that brief period between winter and summer when life is miraculously renewed. The snow, apart from patches here and there, will soon vanish from the land. Our delicate plants, such as the purple saxifrage, fireweed and poppies, suddenly freed from their covering of snow, are quickly greening again. The snow buntings – qupannuaq – always the first to arrive, are being followed by flocks of other migratory birds, among them geese, ducks, loons and terns. The snow-white winter plumage of the ptarmigan – aqiggiit, our Arctic grouse – is taking on its summer camouflage. And our favourite fish, the Arctic char – iqalukpik – will soon begin their seaward migration from lakes connected to the upper reaches of the river, where they overwintered, to feed and replenish in the rich coastal waters of nearby Ungava Bay.

The remoteness of Nunavik has not entirely shielded us from the global reach of the current pandemic, and indeed outbreaks – although small in number – of infection have occurred in two of our communities. And so, for the past two months, I have been living in self-isolation, part of this time caring for my seven-year-old grandson, Inuapik. He’s an extremely active little boy, always curious and observant. He has kept me on my toes from dawn to dusk.

That’s five writers, across a span of 400 years, all moaning about the same erosion of standards. And yet the period also encompasses some of the greatest works of English literature.

But the problem is that writers at that time also felt they were speaking a degraded, faltering tongue.

it’s a powerful intuition, but the evidence of its effects has simply never materialised. That is because it is unscientific nonsense.

Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up.

there is something perplexing about claims like this. By their nature, they imply that we were smarter and more precise in the past.

“Without grammar, we lose the agreed-upon standards about what means what. We lose the ability to communicate when respondents are not actually in the same room speaking to one another. Without grammar, we lose the precision required to be effective and purposeful in writing.”

“Some changes would be wholly unacceptable, as they would cause confusion and the language would lose shades of meaning,”

The Queen’s English Society, a British organisation, has long been fighting to prevent this decline.

“Their language is deteriorating. They are lowering the bar. Our language is flying off at all tangents, without the anchor of a solid foundation.”

“There is a worrying trend of adults mimicking teen-speak. They are using slang words and ignoring grammar,”

The doomsayers