Inuit Languages - Classification and History

Classification and History

The language of the Inuit is an Eskimo–Aleut language. It is fairly closely related to the Yupik languages, and more remotely to the Aleut language. These cousin languages are all spoken in Western Alaska and Eastern Chukotka, Russia. It is not discernibly related to other North American or northeast Asian indigenous languages, although some have proposed that it is related to Uralic languages such as Finnish and Saami in the proposed Uralo-Siberian grouping, or even Indo-European languages as part of the hypothetical Nostratic superphylum. Some consider it a Paleo-Siberian language, although that is more a geographic than a linguistic grouping.

Early forms of the Inuit language were spoken by the Thule people, who overran the Dorset people, who had previously occupied Arctic America, at the beginning of the second millennium. By 1300, the Inuit and their language had reached western Greenland, and finally east Greenland roughly at the same time the Viking colony in southern Greenland disappeared. It is generally believed that it was during this centuries-long eastward migration that the Inuit language became distinct from the Yupik languages spoken in Western Alaska and Chukotka.

Until 1902, a possible enclave of Dorset people or Sadlermiut (in modern Inuktitut spelling Sallirmiut) existed on Southampton Island. Almost nothing is known about their language, but the few eyewitness accounts tell of them speaking a "strange dialect". This suggests that they also spoke an Eskimo–Aleut language, but one quite distinct from the forms spoken in Canada today.

The Yupik and Inuit languages are very similar syntactically and morphologically. Their common origin can be seen in a number of cognates:

The western Alaskan variants retain a large number of features present in proto-Inuit language and in Yup'ik, enough so that they might be classed as Yup'ik languages if they were viewed in isolation from the larger Inuit world.