The Inuit

8 Pages 1978 Words

people were overrun by the Thule Inuit, “who by AD 1000 to 1200 had reached Greenland” (Chance 80). There, Inuit culture was influenced by medieval Norse colonists and, “after 1700” (Chance 84), by Danish settlers.
The languages of the Inuit peoples constitute a subfamily of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. A major linguistic division occurs in Alaska, according to whether the speakers call themselves Inuit (singular, Inuk) or Yuit (singular, Yuk). It forms a dialect chain that consists of many dialects, each understandable to speakers of neighboring dialects, although not to speakers of geographically distant dialects. This basically means that nearby bands can understand each other even though they may change the language amongst themselves. The western branch, called Yupik, includes three distinct languages: Central Alaskan Yupik and Pacific Gulf Yupik in Alaska and Siberian Yupik, in Alaska, and Canada, each with several dialects. According to Chance, the Inupiaq dialects have more than 40,000 speakers in Greenland and more than 20,000 in Alaska and Canada. Yupik languages are spoken by “about 17,000 people, including some 1000 in the former Soviet Union” (Chance 18). These various !
languages are used for the first year of school in some parts of Siberia, for religious instruction and education in schools under Inuit control in Alaska, and in schools and communications media in Canada and Greenland. A unique aspect to the Inupiaq and Yupik languages is that some of their root words are so complex that they can serve as an entire sentence with the proper suffixes. These suffixes function much like verb endings, case endings, prepositional phrases and even as clauses found in the English language.
Because these languages a...