See the article on Eskimo for more information on this word. Consonants in parentheses are non-Proto-Eskimo phonemes.

Eskimo consists of two divisions: Yupik, spoken in Siberia and southwestern Alaska, and Inuit, spoken in northern Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Criticisms have been made stating that Greenberg's hypothesis is ahistorical, meaning that it lacks and sacrifices known historical elements of language in favour of external similarities.

Long vowels are lower than their short counterpart vowels, but are less retracted if they make contact with a uvular consonant. ), The "fact" that there are many Inuit words for snow has been put forward so often that it has become a journalistic cliché.[12]. Orthographically, they would be spelled ii, uu, and aa. In Alaska, another Latin alphabet is used, with some characters using diacritics. For example, in central Nunavut Inuktitut: This long word is composed of a root word tusaa- "to hear" followed by five suffixes: This sort of word construction is pervasive in the Inuit languages and makes it very unlike English. Consonants are arranged with five places of articulation: bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular; and three manners of articulation: voiceless stops, voiced continuants, and nasals, as well as two additional sounds—voiceless fricatives. Forms are given in native Latin orthographies unless otherwise noted. Every word must have only one root (free morpheme) always at the beginning. Iqaluit, for example, is simply the plural of the noun iqaluk "fish" ("Arctic char", "salmon" or "trout" depending on dialect[8]). Thus, the global population of speakers of varieties of Inuit is on the order of nearly 100,000 people. Inuit, which means “the people” or “the real people,” 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. Vovin, Alexander. 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. This means subjects of intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs are marked with the absolutive case, while subjects of transitive verbs are marked with the ergative case. Inuit allows only a single initial consonant and no more than two successive consonants between vowels. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. In addition, an estimated 7,000 Greenlandic Inuit live in Denmark, the largest group outside Greenland, Canada and Alaska. The Inuit live primarily in three countries: Greenland, Canada (specifically in the Nunatsiavut region of Labrador, the Nunavik region of Quebec, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories), and the United States (specifically the coast of Alaska).

Inuit also use animal names, traditionally believing that by using those names, they took on some of the characteristics of that animal: "Nanuq" or "Nanoq" in Kalaallisut (polar-bear), "Uqalik" or "Ukaleq" in Kalaallisut (Arctic hare), and "Tiriaq" or "Teriaq" in Kalaallisut (ermine) are favourites. In Greenland the official form of Inuit language, and the official language of the state, is called Kalaallisut. The morphology and syntax of the Inuit languages vary to some degree between dialects, and the article Inuit grammar describes primarily central Nunavut dialects, but the basic principles will generally apply to all of them and to some degree to Yupik languages as well. By 1300, the Inuit and their language had reached western Greenland, and finally east Greenland roughly at the same time the Viking colonies in southern Greenland disappeared.

Not since 1921, however, have these words been carefully examined, updated and collated. Those affixes may modify the syntactic and semantic properties of the base word, or may add qualifiers to it in much the same way that English uses adjectives or prepositional phrases to qualify nouns (e.g.

[22][23], "His/Her own" specifies ownership, in contrast with "his/her", which does not.