Eskimo-Aleut languages

Family of languages spoken in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, U.S., and eastern Siberia by the Eskimo and Aleut peoples.

Aleut, distantly related to the Eskimo languages, consists of eastern and western dialects; today both are spoken by fewer than 400 people. The Eskimo languages have two subgroups: Yupik (five languages), spoken on the Chukchi Peninsula in Siberia and in southwestern Alaska; and Inupiaq-Inuktitut, a continuum of dialects spoken across arctic Alaska and Canada to the coasts of Labrador and Greenland. Yupik languages are spoken today by about 13,000 people, while Inupiaq-Inuktitut has more than 100,000 speakers, nearly half of whom speak Greenlandic Inuktitut.

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Introduction

      family of languages spoken in Greenland, Canada, Alaska (United States), and eastern Siberia (Russia), by the Eskimo and Aleut peoples. Aleut (Aleut language) is a single language with two surviving dialects. Eskimo consists of two divisions: Yupik, spoken in Siberia and southwestern Alaska, and Inuit, spoken in northern Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Each division includes several dialects. The proposed relationship of Eskimo-Aleut with other language families, such as Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Uralic, and/or Indo-European, remains conjectural.

Classification and distribution

      Eskimo is a blanket term for Inuit and Yupik, the two mutually unintelligible main divisions of the Eskimo languages. The name Aleut, used by Russian fur traders from the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1745, refers primarily to the people of the Aleutian Islands, who call themselves Unangan or (in the dialect of Atka) Unangas, but also by extension to the Pacific Yupiks, who call themselves Alutiit (plural of Alutiiq), an adaptation of the Russian name.

Inuit (Inuit language)

      Inuit, which means “people” (plural of inuk, “person”), is used as a name for the language spoken in Greenland, Arctic Canada, and northern Alaska, U.S., west to the Bering Strait and south to Norton Sound. It is a dialect continuum, in which neighbouring dialects are mutually intelligible but the cumulative differences impede or prevent understanding between groups that are some distance apart. This distinctiveness can be seen in the variety of language names; the Inuit language of Greenland is called Kalaallisut (literally “in the Greenlandic way”), that of eastern Canada Inuktitut, that of western Canada Inuktitun (literally “in the Inuit way”), and that of North Alaska Inupiaq (literally “real person”).

Yupik (Yupik language)

      Yupik, a dialectal form meaning “real person,” includes five languages: Central Alaskan Yupik, spoken southward from Norton Sound; Pacific Yupik, commonly called Alutiiq, spoken from the Alaska Peninsula eastward to Prince William Sound; Naukanski Siberian Yupik, whose speakers were resettled southward from Cape Dezhnyov, the easternmost point of the Eurasian landmass; Central Siberian Yupik (mainly Chaplinski), which is spoken in the Chukchi Peninsula and on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska; and the very divergent Sirenikski, now virtually extinct.

Aleut

      The Aleut language survives in two mutually intelligible dialects: Eastern Aleut, spoken mostly by middle-aged and older people living in eight villages from the Alaska Peninsula westward through Umnak Island, Aleutian Islands, and in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, which were settled beginning in 1800; and Atkan Aleut, which is spoken also by young people (but no children) on Atka Island, Aleutian Islands, and by some old people on Bering Island, Komandor Islands, Russia, settled in 1826. Attu, once the westernmost Aleut dialect in Alaska, is now extinct in Alaska, but Attuan Aleut survives on Bering Island in a creolized form (Russian Aleut), with Russian verbal inflections.

       Eskimo-Aleut languages, TableThe table (Eskimo-Aleut languages, Table) below indicates the state of the Eskimo-Aleut languages in the last decade of the 20th century.

Linguistic characteristics

Phonological characteristics

      Eskimo and Aleut have relatively simple systems of distinctive sounds. The accent (stress) depends upon the length or the number of the syllables and never has independent value as in English.

Vowels (vowel)

      All the languages have the three vowels usually written a, i, and u, whose pronunciation is determined by the consonants that follow or precede them. They occur both in short and simple form and combined into long vowels; in Inuit and Alaskan Yupik vowels also may be combined into diphthongs. Yupik has an additional short e, which sounds like the e in roses or taxes. In Inuit this sound has become identical with the vowel written i. In Aleut it has become identical with a, i, or u, or it has been dropped from the language.

Consonants (consonant)

      Of distinctive consonants, the Eskimo languages have from 13 to 27, depending on the dialect. The stop sounds include the labial p, the dental t (made with the tip of the tongue touching the back of the upper teeth), the velar k, and the uvular q (made with stoppage of the airstream by contact of the back of the tongue and the uvula or back velum); in Alaskan Yupik there is also a palatal c (like English ch), to which an s corresponds in the other dialects. In parts of Canada this has changed to h. The nasal sounds, made with the breath passing through the nose, include m, n, and ŋ (as in “sing”), and, in Yupik, also voiceless nasals (i.e., nasal sounds made without vocal cord vibration). Voiced and voiceless varieties of the continuant consonants v, l, g, and the uvular r—which is written in Inupiaq and Siberian Yupik with a modified g—are distinctive sounds in the western dialects but in eastern Inuit they are only variants. In addition to y (written in Canada and Greenland as j), some dialects have sounds similar to English r or z or to sh (in Greenlandic written s). Corresponding to these, Aleut has a fricative d (pronounced as the th in that); e.g., Aleut da- “eye” is related to Yupik ii and iya, Inuit iri, izi, and iji, Greenlandic isi (pronounced ishi). Aleut shares with Eskimo most of the consonants articulated with the tongue, including the uvular q, ĝ, and  and the ch and s, but it has p and labial fricatives (f and v) only in loanwords from Russian or English. Aleut m corresponds with Eskimo m and v; to Eskimo p corresponds the Aleut h (in initial position) and the Aleut aspirated nasal sound hm (pronounced with an accompanying puff of air)—e.g., Aleut hum- “to swell” corresponds to Yupik puve-; Aleut ahmat- “to ask” is cognate with Yupik apete-.

      In initial position, Eskimo uses only a single consonant; between vowels at most two. In contrast, Aleut has initial consonant clusters, resulting from the loss of a vowel in the first syllable from an older historical form—e.g., Aleut sla- “weather,” Inuit sila.

Grammatical characteristics

      Eskimo has a great number of suffixes but only one prefix and no compounds. In Aleut the word forms are simpler, but syntax can be more complex. Suffixes often are accompanied by changes in the stem, such as the doubling of consonants in Inuit—e.g., nanuq “polar bear,” dual nannuk “two polar bears,” plural nannut “several polar bears”; inuk “person,” dual innuk, plural inuit; umialik “owner of boat (umiaq), chief,” dual umiallak, plural umialgit (Inupiaq). Note the doubled consonants in the dual and plural forms of some terms and the other consonant and vowel alternations.

      Grammatical numbers—singular, dual, plural—combine with suffixes for person—e.g., Inupiaq ulu-ga “my knife,” and ulu-t-ka “my knives,” in which -t- means “several” and -ga or -ka “my.” The possessor of someone or something occurs in the so-called relative case—e.g., umialgum pania “the chief's (his) daughter,” in which pani-a means “his or her daughter”; this is distinguished from the reflexive panni “his or her own daughter” and the stem panik.

      Yupik and Inuit nouns and pronouns have, respectively, five and six adverbial cases, expressing relations such as “in,” “to,” “from,” “along,” “with,” and “like”—e.g., iglu-mi “in the house,” iglu-ptiŋ-ni “in our house.” Adverbial cases are reduced to two (in/to, from/along) in Aleut and are limited to pronouns and relation words—e.g., ula-m nag-a-n “of house (ula-m) in its (-a-) interior”; this corresponds to Inupiaq iglu-m ilu-a-ni “in the house.”

      In Eskimo, an adverbial case is used also to mark an indefinite object—e.g., singular -mek in Alaskan Yupik: arnaq neq-mek ner'uq (r' = rr) “the woman is eating (a) fish,” where the subject is in the absolutive case (comparable with a nominative) and the verb in the simple singular (no suffix). A definite object, on the contrary, is in the absolutive case, while the subject is in the relative case (also used as a genitive) and the verb has a suffix referring both to the object and to the subject: arna-m neqa nera-a “the woman is eating the fish,” nera-a “she (or he) is eating it.” In Aleut, where the nouns have lost the oblique cases, the system has been transformed into a distinction such as between a specified object in the absolutive case, with a nominal subject in the absolutive case as well, and an anaphoric object, with a nominal subject in the relative case: ayaga- qa- qaku- “the woman is eating (a or the) fish” (- is a singular suffix) versus ayaga-m qaku-u “the woman is eating it.” An object in the first or second person is marked by a final suffix in Eskimo and by an independent pronoun in Aleut—e.g., Yupik ikayura-a-nga, Aleut ting kiduku- “he is helping me.”

      Verbal modes include indicative (“he goes”), interrogative (“did he go?”), imperative (“go!”), optative (“may he go”), participles (“going, gone”), and other forms corresponding to English-language subordinate clauses—i.e., clauses beginning with “if,” “when,” and so forth. Other modal relations and tenses are specified by derivational suffixes and, in Aleut, by auxiliary verbs—e.g., haqa-l saĝa-na “coming he slept” is equivalent to “he came yesterday.” An Eskimo derivative form may also correspond to an English complex sentence—e.g., Inupiaq tikit₁-qaaġ₂-mina₃-it₄-ni₅-ga₆-a_7–8 is “he (A)₈ said_5–6 that he (B)₇ would not₄ be able₃ to arrive₁ first₂,” or, in exact Eskimo order, “to arrive first be able would not said him he.”

Vocabulary

      A remarkable feature of the vocabulary is the great number of demonstratives, about 30 in Inupiaq and Yupik and in Aleut. For example, in Aleut there is hakan “that one high up there” (as a bird in the air), qakun “that one in there” (as in another room), and uman “this one unseen” (heard, smelled, felt).

      The vocabulary naturally has its local particularities, the various groups having lived under very different conditions. The word that means “meat” in Inuit and some Yupik languages from Greenland to Siberia means “fish” south of Norton Sound and also in Aleut. Word taboo has also played its part, as in East Greenlandic, in which the usual Eskimo-Aleut word for “eye” has been replaced by uitsatai (ui-sa + uta-i) “those by which he keeps gazing.”

      Eskimo-Aleut derived words (i.e., words that are formed in the way that such English words as “winter-ize” or “anti-dis-establish-ment-ari-an-ism” are formed) correspond quite often to simple, nonderived English words. The possibility of derivation is virtually unlimited in the languages, while the number of word stems is comparatively small. Examples of derivatives in Greenlandic are: nalu-voq “is ignorant,” nalu-vaa “does not know it,” and nalu-na-ar- “make not (-er-) to be (-na-, -nar-) ignored,” which is equivalent to “communicate.” Nalunaar-asuar-ta-at “that by which (-ut) one communicates habitually (-ta-, -tar-) in a hurry (-asuar-),” a term (now little used) coined in the 1880s, is Greenlandic for “telegraph.”

      Greenlandic contains four loanwords from medieval Norse; from the colonial period after 1721 there have been surprisingly few borrowings until the mid-20th century. In Aleut and in the Yupik of former Russian Alaska there are many borrowings from Russian, and there are several in Siberian Eskimo from English, and many from Chukchi, a Paleo-Siberian language. Notable Eskimo contributions to the vocabulary of English and other European languages are “igloo” (iglu) and “kayak” (qayaq).

Alphabets and orthography

      The first book in an Eskimo language was published in 1742 by Hans Egede, a Dano-Norwegian missionary to Greenland. It was printed in the current Roman alphabet (Latin alphabet).

      In 1851 Samuel Kleinschmidt, a German missionary of the Moravian Brethren, systematized the Greenlandic orthography, introducing a special letter and three accents to represent the distinctive sounds of the language. In 1973 the Kleinschmidt orthography was replaced by an orthography in the current Roman alphabet. Numerous publications have appeared in both orthographies.

      Moravian missionaries to Labrador, in Canada, published books in Inuit (there called Inuttut) beginning in the early 19th century and toward the end of the century standardized the orthography according to Kleinschmidt's principles. In 1855 the syllabic characters originally designed for the Ojibwa and Cree Indians were introduced to the Inuit of the eastern Arctic, where they are still in use. The Roman alphabet was introduced at a later date to the Inuit of the western Arctic. In 1976 a systematic orthography in the Roman alphabet was proposed for all the Inuit of Canada. In Alaska, Protestant missionaries beginning in 1948 developed for Alaskan Inuit (Inupiaq) a Roman orthography with seven additional letters (now reduced to six).

      For the Alaskan Yupik, Moravian missionaries in the 1920s used the ordinary Roman alphabet. In 1971 and 1972 linguists of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks designed systematic practical orthographies in the Roman alphabet for Alaskan Yupik (with three auxiliary accents) and for Siberian Yupik of St. Lawrence Island, both used in many publications. On the Russian (Russia) side, a Roman alphabet with two additional letters was introduced for Siberian Yupik in 1932, but in 1937 it was replaced by the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

      An adequate Cyrillic alphabet was designed for the Aleut language by the Russian Orthodox missionary Ivan Veniaminov (now known as St. Innocent (Innocent Veniaminov, Saint)) about 1830 and was used in religious translations. In 1972 a new Roman orthography with two additional letters was designed by Knut Bergsland for use in the Aleut schools of Alaska.

Knut Bergsland

Additional Reading

Bibliography, demographic data, and literacy programs are addressed in Dirmid R.F. Collis (ed.), Arctic Languages: An Awakening (1990). Linguistic information may be found in Anthony C. Woodbury, “Eskimo and Aleut Languages,” in William C. Sturtevant (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 5, Arctic, ed. by David Damas (1984), pp. 49–63; Michael Fortescue, Steven Jacobson, and Lawrence Kaplan, Comparative Eskimo Dictionary with Aleut Cognates (1994); Michael Fortescue, West Greenlandic (1984); Steven Jacobson and Anna W. Jacobson, A Practical Grammar of the Central Alaskan Yup'ik Eskimo Language (1995); Joseph de Reuse, Siberian Yupik Eskimo: The Language and Its Contacts with Chukchi (1994); Steven A. Jacobson (compiler), Yup'ik Eskimo Dictionary (1984); and Knut Bergsland (compiler), Aleut Dictionary (1994).Knut Bergsland

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