It also has some recognition in NunatuKavut and Nunatsiavut—the Inuit area in Labrador—following the ratification of its agreement with the government of Canada and the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The 2016 Canadian census reports that 70,540 individuals identify themselves as Inuit, of whom 37,570 self-reported Inuktitut as their mother tongue.

The Inuktitut language provided them with all the vocabulary required to describe traditional practices and natural features.

[10] Inuit themselves viewed Inuktitut as the way to express their feelings and be linked to their identity, while English was a tool for making money.

Inuktitut was seen as a language worth preserving, and it was argued that knowledge, particularly in the first years of school, is best transmitted in the mother tongue.

In 1969, most Inuit voted to eliminate federal schools and replace them with programs by the General Directorate of New Quebec [fr] (Direction générale du Nouveau-Québec, DGNQ).

The 2001 census data shows that the use of Inuktitut, while lower among the young than the elderly, has stopped declining in Canada as a whole and may even be increasing in Nunavut.

This has in recent years made it a much more widely heard dialect, since a great deal of Inuktitut media originates in Iqaluit.

Although Nunatsiavut claims over 4,000 inhabitants of Inuit descent, only 550 reported Inuktitut to be their native language in the 2001 census, mostly in the town of Nain.

One example is the word qangatasuukkuvimmuuriaqalaaqtunga (ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕕᒻᒨᕆᐊᖃᓛᖅᑐᖓ) meaning 'I'll have to go to the airport:[22] The western part of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories use a Latin alphabet usually called Inuinnaqtun or Qaliujaaqpait, reflecting the predispositions of the missionaries who reached this area in the late 19th century and early 20th.

Moravian missionaries, with the purpose of introducing Inuit to Christianity and the Bible, contributed to the development of an Inuktitut alphabet in Greenland during the 1760s that was based on the Latin script.

In the 1860s, missionaries imported this system of Qaniujaaqpait, which they had developed in their efforts to convert the Cree to Christianity, to the Eastern Canadian Inuit.

In September 2019, a unified orthography called Inuktut Qaliujaaqpait, based on the Latin alphabet without diacritics, was adopted for all varieties of Inuktitut by the national organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, after eight years of work.

It was developed by Inuit to be used by speakers of any dialect from any region, and can be typed on electronic devices without specialized keyboard layouts.

It includes letters such as ff, ch, and rh, the sounds for which exist in some dialects but do not have standard equivalents in syllabics.

The apostrophe represents a glottal stop when after a vowel (e.g., maꞌna), or separates an n from an ng (e.g., avin'ngaq) or an r from an rh (e.g., qar'rhuk).

[26] Noted literature in Inuktitut has included the novels Harpoon of the Hunter by Markoosie Patsauq,[27] and Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk.

Though conventionally called a syllabary, the writing system has been classified by some observers as an abugida, since syllables starting with the same consonant have related glyphs rather than unrelated ones.

The territorial government of Nunavut, Canada, has developed TrueType fonts called Pigiarniq[30][31] (ᐱᒋᐊᕐᓂᖅ [pi.ɡi.aʁ.ˈniq]), Uqammaq[30][32] (ᐅᖃᒻᒪᖅ [u.qam.maq]), and Euphemia[30][33] (ᐅᕓᒥᐊ [u.vai.mi.a]) for computer displays.

Apple Macintosh computers include an Inuktitut IME (Input Method Editor) as part of keyboard language options.

The book ᐃᓕᐊᕐᔪᒃ ᓇᓄᕐᓗ (The Orphan and the Polar Bear) became the first work ever translated into Inuktitut Braille, and a copy is held at the headquarters of the Nunavut Public Library Services at Baker Lake.