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Eskimo-Aleut

2 reference results for: Eskimo-Aleut

Columbia Encyclopedia

Eskimo-Aleut, family of Native American languages consisting of Aleut (spoken on the Aleutian Islands and the Kodiak Peninsula) and Eskimo or Inuktitut (spoken in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia). Aleut is the language of a few thousand people, and Eskimo is native to over 100,000 people. There are a few varieties of the Eskimo language. Eskimo and Aleut have enough similarities to justify the theory that they are descendants of a single ancestor language. A striking and important feature of both tongues is polysynthesism (see Native American languages). In a polysynthetic language, a one-word unit composed of a number of word elements can convey the meaning of an entire sentence of an Indo-European language. Eskimo and Aleut make great use of suffixes, but almost never of prefixes. Internal vowel changes are rare. Both languages are highly inflected. The difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is clearly shown. Three numbers are found—singular, dual, and plural. Phonetically, there are three main vowels in Eskimo, and from 13 to 20 consonants, the number varying according to the dialect. In earlier times the Eskimos had only pictographic writing. Since the 18th cent., however, the Eskimos of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska have used an adaptation of the Roman alphabet, introduced by missionaries. The Eskimos of modern Siberia and the Aleut-speaking groups employ the Cyrillic alphabet.

See K. Bergslund, A Grammatical Outline of the Eskimo Language of West Greenland (1955) and Aleut Dialects of Atha and Attu (1959); L. L. Hammerich, The Eskimo Language (1970); M. E. Krauss, Alaskan Native Languages (1980).

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Wikipedia

Eskimo-Aleut is a language family native to Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, Alaska, and parts of Siberia. Also called Eskaleut (Eskaleutian, Eskaleutic), Eskimoan or Macro-Eskimo, it consists of the Eskimo languages (known as Inuit in the north of Alaska, Canada and Greenland, and as Yupik/Yup'ik in western and southwestern Alaska and in Siberia), and the single Aleut language of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands.

Eskimo is an exonym of Algonquian origin and is a deprecated name, but is retained to speak of the Yuit-Yup'ik-Inuit as a whole. Within Canada, Inuit is preferred. In Alaska, Yup'ik, Inupiaq, or Inuit is preferred, depending on who is being referred to.

Traditionally, the Eskimo language family was divided into the Inuit group and the Yup'ik (or Yup'ik-Yuit) group. However, recent research suggests that Yup'ik by itself is not a valid node, or, equivalently, that the Inuit dialect continuum is but one of several languages of the Yup'ik group. However, although it may be technically correct to replace the term Eskimo with Yup'ik in this classification, this would not be acceptable to most Inuit. Also, the Alaskan-Siberian dichotomy appears to have been geographical rather than linguistic.

Eskimo-Aleut

Aleut

Western-Central dialects: Atkan, Attuan, Unangan, Bering (60-80 speakers)

Eastern dialects: Unalaskan, Pribilof (400 speakers)

Eskimo

Yupik

Central Alaskan Yup'ik (10,000 speakers)

Alutiiq or Pacific Gulf Yup'ik (400 speakers)

Yuit or Central Siberian Yupik (Chaplinon and St Lawrence Island, 1400 speakers)

Naukanski (70 speakers)

Chaplinski

Inuit or Inupik (75,000 speakers)

Inupiaq or Inupiat (northern Alaska, 3,500 speakers)

Inuvialuktun (western Canada, 765 speakers)

Inuktitut (eastern Canada; together with Inuktun and Inuinnaqtun, 30,000 speakers)

Kalaallisut (Greenland, 47,000 speakers)

Sirenik (extinct)

According to Joseph Greenberg's highly controversial classification of the languages of Native North America, Eskimo-Aleut is one of the three main groups of Native languages spoken in the Americas, and represents a distinct wave of migration from Asia to the Americas. The other two are Na-Dené (which includes Athabaskan and a small number of related tongues) and Amerind (Greenberg's most controversial classification, which includes every language native to the Americas that is not Eskimo-Aleut or Na-Dené).

Notes

Bibliography

Bernet, John W. An Anthology of Aleut, Eskimo, and Indian Literature of Alaska in English Translation. Fairbanks, Alaska: [s.n.], 1974.
Conference on Eskimo Linguistics, and Eric P. Hamp. Papers on Eskimo and Aleut Linguistics. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1976.
Dumond, Don E. On Eskaleutian Linguistics, Archaeology, and Prehistory. [S.l: s.n, 1965.
Fleming, Harold C. "Towards a definitive classification of the world's languages". Diachronica IV:1/2.159-223, 1987.
Fortescue, Michael D. Some Problems Concerning the Correlation and Reconstruction of Eskimo and Aleut Mood Markers. København: Institut for Eskimologi, Københavns Universitet, 1984. ISBN 8787874105
Fortescue, Michael D., Steven A. Jacobson, and Lawrence D. Kaplan. Comparative Eskimo Dictionary: With Aleut Cognates. Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1994. ISBN 1555000517
Marsh, Gordon H. The Linguistic Divisions of the Eskimo-Aleut Stock. 1956.
Swift, Mary D. Time in Child Inuktitut: A Developmental Study of an Eskimo-Aleut Language. Studies on language acquisition, 24. Berlin: M. de Gruyter, 2004. ISBN 3110181207

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