Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting – Professor Lenore Grenoble stared at the bowl of raw beluga meat and gulped. “So this is mattak?” Grenoble asked, using the Greenlandic word for the Inuit delicacy. An elder eyed Grenoble as she moved a gelatinous slice toward her mouth. The whale meat smelled like fishy butter. “It’s chewy,” she said, swallowing her first bite. “It’s not what I expected.” Experiencing the unexpected is just part of the job for Grenoble, 51, a University of Chicago linguist who studies endangered languages. Rickety airplanes, horrible hotels and unusual cuisine are facts of life in fieldwork that often occurs far from her Hyde Park office … Grenoble smiles through the hardships because she believes that language is much more than words — it’s our culture, our history. It’s what connects people to one another, and if it’s lost, a society is truly threatened.

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More information:

• Untold Stories (Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting): “Learning Greenlandic – one æ at a time” (July 29, 2009).
• Untold Stories (Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting): “Puju: a language warrior” (Aug. 05, 2009).