From Alaska to Greenland, Inuit speech shifts village by village into mutual incomprehension
Every Inuit community understands its neighbours, and probably the neighbours beyond them. Travel far enough across the Arctic, though, and comprehension fades almost to nothing. That seamless chain of dialects, spoken by roughly 100,000 people, is why nobody agrees on where one Inuit language stops and the next begins.
Inuit languages form one of two branches of the Eskaleut family, the other being the Yupik languages of Alaska and Russia's Far East, with Aleut a more distant relative. They show no clear kinship with other languages of the Americas or northeast Asia, despite unproven proposals linking them to Uralic tongues or a vast Nostratic superfamily. The old label Eskimo also covers Yupik and is strongly discouraged in Canada.
Speakers live mainly in Greenland, Canada and northern and western Alaska. Greenland counts roughly 50,000. Canada's 2021 census recorded 70,540 Inuit, of whom 33,790 named Inuktut as their first language. Alaska has about 7,500 speakers among more than 13,000 Inuit, and some 7,000 Greenlandic Inuit live in Denmark, the largest community outside North America. Because most figures are self-reported, true fluency is hard to measure.
Names multiply with the dialects. Greenland's official state language is Kalaallisut, known elsewhere as Greenlandic. Alaskans speak Iñupiatun, with Seward Peninsula varieties called Qawiaraq. In Canada, Inuktitut is recognised as an official language of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, yet western groups say Inuinnaqtun or Inuvialuktun, Quebec speakers say Inuttitut, and Labrador uses Inuttut. Nunavut's government, the national organisation Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the Inuit Circumpolar Council and Statistics Canada have adopted Inuktut as an umbrella term for the Canadian varieties.
Signing is part of the picture too. Canada has Inuit Sign Language, while Greenland uses a sign language that is a dialect of Danish Sign Language, and scholars do not know whether the two are related. The Canadian one is gradually losing ground to American Sign Language, prompting efforts to support it.
Source: Inuit languages
