Greenlandic language

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Greenlandic, known to speakers as Kalaallisut, is the Inuit language spoken in Greenland. It belongs to the Eskaleut language family and is the biggest language in its branch by number of speakers, with about 57,000 native speakers today. It is the sole official language of Greenland and is also recognized as a minority language in Denmark.

Dialects and varieties
- The main standard form is Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), the basis for education and media.
- East Greenlandic (Tunumiit oraasiat) is more innovative, with distinctive sound changes.
- Inughuit speech (Inuktun) in the far north is a dialect of Inuktitut, not Kalaallisut.
- Greenlandic has several subdialects within Kalaallisut, reflecting regional variation.

History and writing
- Greenland was settled by the Thule people around the 1200s. Earlier Greenlandic languages from earlier cultures are not well known.
- European contact began in the 1600s, and Danish influence grew with colonization. Greenlandic dictionaries and grammars appeared in the 18th century.
- From 1851 to 1973, Greenlandic was written in a difficult orthography created by Samuel Kleinschmidt. In 1973, a reform made the writing system closer to how words are spoken, which helped literacy rise sharply.
- Since 2009, Greenlandic has been the only official language of Greenland. Danish remains widely used, but Greenlandic is the primary language in schools and government.

Writing system and alphabet
- Greenlandic uses a Latin-based alphabet with 18 letters. Some foreign sounds are written with letters like q and x, and loanwords come from Danish and English.
- In the past, Greenlandic used special diacritics; the 1973 reform simplified spelling to match pronunciation more closely.

Grammar and structure
- Greenlandic is highly synthetic and mainly uses suffixes to build meaning. Words can become very long by adding many suffixes.
- It follows an ergative-absolutive pattern in nouns, while verbs show agreement with both the subject and the object.
- There are eight grammatical cases for nouns and eight moods for verbs. Verbs can express complex ideas with many derivational suffixes (postbases) that modify meaning.
- The basic word order in transitive sentences is subject–object–verb, but Greenlandic is flexible and uses word order to emphasize new or important information.
- Greenlandic has no traditional tense. Time is shown mainly through context and special temporal suffixes or particles.
- The language distinguishes four persons (including a fourth, obviating person used in subordinate clauses) and two numbers (singular and plural; there is no grammatical dual).

Vocabulary and word formation
- Most Greenlandic words come from Proto-Eskimo–Aleut, but many new terms are created from Greenlandic roots to name modern concepts (for example, qarasaasiaq for “computer”).
- Loanwords from Danish and English are common, but Greenlandic often adapts them to its own sound system.
- A rich system of derivation means a single root can yield many related words, creating large word families.

Nouns, pronouns, and possession
- Nouns are marked for eight cases and for number; possession is shown on the noun and agrees with the possessor.
- There are personal pronouns, but in many sentences the verb’s inflection makes pronouns optional.
- The language uses a special fourth person to mark certain indirect references in complex sentences.

Status and culture
- Greenlandic literacy is very high, and the language is central to education and media in Greenland.
- It is considered vulnerable by UNESCO, with concerns about dialectal variation and ongoing efforts to protect and promote the language.
- In Greenland today, most children grow up bilingual in Greenlandic and Danish, with Greenlandic increasingly shaping national identity and daily life.

Dialects, grammar, and modern use all reflect a language that is ancient in roots but very much alive and adapting to contemporary Greenlandic society.