Greenlandic, also known by its endonym Kalaallisut (, ), is an Inuit language belonging to the Eskimoan branch of the Eskaleut language family. It is primarily spoken by the Greenlandic people native to Greenland, with about native speakers as of 2025, making it the largest Eskaleut language by number of speakers. Written in the Latin script, it is the sole official language of Greenland, and a recognized minority language in Denmark.
In June 2009, the government of Greenland, the Naalakkersuisut, made Greenlandic the sole official language of the autonomous territory, to strengthen it in the face of competition from the colonial language, Danish. Greenlandic is closely related to Canadian Inuit languages such as Inuktitut. The main variety is Kalaallisut, or West Greenlandic. The second variety is , or East Greenlandic. The language of the Inughuit (Thule Inuit) of Greenland, Inuktun or Polar Inuit, is a recent arrival and a dialect of Inuktitut.
Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language that allows the creation of long words by stringing together roots and suffixes. The language's morphosyntactic alignment is ergative, treating both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb in one way, but the subject of a transitive verb in another. For example, "he plays the guitar" would be in the ergative case as a transitive agent, whereas "I bought a guitar" and "as the guitar plays" (the latter being the intransitive sense of the same verb "to play") would both be in the absolutive case.
Nouns are inflected by one of eight cases and for possession. Verbs are inflected for one of eight moods and for the number and person of its subject and object. Both nouns and verbs have complex derivational morphology. The basic word order in transitive clauses is subject–object–verb. The subordination of clauses uses special subordinate moods. A so-called fourth-person category enables switch-reference between main clauses and subordinate clauses with different subjects. Greenlandic is notable for its lack of grammatical tense; temporal relations are expressed normally by context but also by the use of temporal particles such as "yesterday" or "now" or sometimes by the use of derivational suffixes or the combination of affixes with aspectual meanings with the semantic lexical aspect of different verbs. However, some linguists have suggested that Greenlandic always marks future tense. Another question is whether the language has noun incorporation or whether the processes that create complex predicates that include nominal roots are derivational in nature.
When adopting new concepts or technologies, Greenlandic usually constructs new words made from Greenlandic roots, but modern Greenlandic has also taken many loans from Danish and English. The language has been written in Latin script since Danish colonization began in the 1700s. Greenlandic's first orthography was developed by Samuel Kleinschmidt in 1851, but within 100 years, it already differed substantially from the spoken language because of a number of sound changes. An extensive orthographic reform was undertaken in 1973 and made the script much easier to learn. This resulted in a boost in Greenlandic literacy, which is now among the highest in the world.
History
Greenlandic was brought to Greenland by the arrival of the Thule people in the 1200s. The languages that were spoken by the earlier Saqqaq and Dorset cultures in Greenland are unknown.
The first descriptions of Greenlandic date from the 1600s. With the arrival of Danish missionaries in the early 1700s and the beginning of Danish colonization of Greenland, the compilation of dictionaries and description of grammar began. The missionary Paul Egede wrote the first Greenlandic dictionary in 1750 and the first grammar in 1760.
From the Danish colonization in the 1700s to the beginning of Greenlandic home rule in 1979, Greenlandic experienced increasing pressure from the Danish language. In the 1950s, Denmark's linguistic policies were directed at strengthening Danish. Of primary significance was the fact that post-primary education and official functions were conducted in Danish.
From 1851 to 1973, Greenlandic was written in a complicated orthography devised by the missionary linguist Samuel Kleinschmidt. In 1973, a new orthography was introduced, intended to bring the written language closer to the spoken standard, which had changed considerably since Kleinschmidt's time. The reform was effective, and in the years following it, Greenlandic literacy received a boost.
Another development that has strengthened Greenlandic language is the policy of "Greenlandization" of Greenlandic society that began with the home rule agreement of 1979. The policy has worked to reverse the former trend towards marginalization of the Greenlandic language by making it the official language of education. The fact that Greenlandic has become the only language used in primary schooling means that monolingual Danish-speaking parents in Greenland are now raising children bilingual in Danish and Greenlandic. Greenlandic now has several dedicated news media: the Greenlandic National Radio, Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa, which provides television and radio programming in Greenlandic. The newspaper Sermitsiaq has been published since 1958 and merged in 2010 with the other newspaper Atuagagdliutit/Grønlandsposten, which had been established in 1861 to form a single large Greenlandic language publishing house.
Before June 2009, Greenlandic shared its status as the official language in Greenland with Danish. Since then, Greenlandic has become the sole official language. That has made Greenlandic the unique case of an Indigenous language of the Americas recognized by law as the only official language of a semi-independent country. Nevertheless, it is still considered to be in a "vulnerable" state by the UNESCO Red Book of Language Endangerment.UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger The country has a 100% literacy rate. As the Western Greenlandic standard has become dominant, a UNESCO report has labelled the other dialects as endangered, and measures are now being considered to protect the Eastern Greenlandic dialect.
Classification
Inuit languages Greenlandic Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) Tunumiisut (East Greenlandic) Inuktun
Kalaallisut and the other Greenlandic dialects belong to the Eskimo–Aleut family and are closely related to the Inuit languages of Canada and Alaska. Illustration 1 shows the locations of the different Inuit languages, among them the two main dialects of Greenlandic and the separate language Inuktun ("Avanersuaq"). + Example of differences between the three main dialects English Kalaallisut Inuktun Tunumiisut humans passim
The most prominent Greenlandic dialect is Kalaallisut, which is the official language of Greenland. The name is often used as a cover term for all of Greenlandic. The eastern dialect (), spoken in the vicinity of Ammassalik Island and Ittoqqortoormiit, is the most innovative of the Greenlandic dialects since it has assimilated consonant clusters and vowel sequences more than West Greenlandic.
Kalaallisut is further divided into four subdialects. One that is spoken around Upernavik has certain similarities to East Greenlandic, possibly because of a previous migration from eastern Greenland. A second dialect is spoken in the region of Uummannaq and the Disko Bay. The standard language is based on the central Kalaallisut dialect spoken in Sisimiut in the north, around Nuuk and as far south as Maniitsoq. Southern Kalaallisut is spoken around Narsaq and Qaqortoq in the south.Rischel, Jørgen. Grønlandsk sprog. Den_Store_Danske_Encyklopædi Vol. 8, Gyldendal Table 1 shows the differences in the pronunciation of the word for "humans" in the two main dialects and Inuktun. It can be seen that Inuktun is the most conservative by maintaining , which has been elided in Kalaallisut, and Tunumiisut is the most innovative by further simplifying its structure by eliding .
Phonology
Vowels FrontBackClose// ⟨i, e⟩// ⟨u, o⟩Open// ⟨a⟩
The Greenlandic three-vowel system, composed of , , and , is typical for an Eskimo–Aleut language. Double vowels are analyzed as two morae and so they are phonologically a vowel sequence and not a long vowel. They are also orthographically written as two vowels. There is only one diphthong, , which occurs only at the ends of words. Before a uvular consonant (, or ); is realized allophonically as , or ; thus, spelled (as in some orthographies used for Quechua and Aymara). is realized allophonically as or ; thus, spelled (as in some orthographies used for Quechua and Aymara). becomes retracted to . Before non-uvular consonants : is closed to word-initially before non-uvulars. is closed to before labials and word-initially before non-uvulars. is fronted to word-finally and word-initially before non-uvulars. Coronal-labial harmony: is retracted to [ʉ] between alveolar and post-alveolar consonants. is rounded to [y] between labial consonants. Elsewhere: is opened to . is closed to . is centred to .
The allophonic lowering of and before uvular consonants is shown in the modern orthography by writing and as and respectively before and . For example:
"husband" pronounced . "(s)he has a husband" pronounced and written . "house" pronounced . "(s)he has a house" pronounced and written .
Consonants + Consonants of KalaallisutLabialAlveolarPalatalVelarUvularplainlateralNasals Plosives Affricates Fricatives () Liquids Semivowel
The labiodental fricative is contrastive only in loanwords. Often, Danish loanwords containing preserve these in writing, but that does not imply a change in pronunciation, for example "beer" and "God"; these are pronounced exactly as .
Grammar Morphology
The broad outline of the Greenlandic grammar is similar to other Eskimo languages, on the morpholological and syntactic plan.
The morphology of Greenlandic is highly synthetic and exclusively suffixing (except for a single highly-limited and fossilized demonstrative prefix). The language creates very long words by means of adding strings of suffixes to a stem. In principle, there is no limit to the length of a Greenlandic word, but in practice, words with more than six derivational suffixes are not so frequent, and the average number of morphemes per word is three to five. The language has between 400 and 500 derivational suffixes and around 318 inflectional suffixes.
There are few compound words but many derivations. The grammar uses a mixture of head and dependent marking. Both agent and patient are marked on the predicate, and the possessor is marked on nouns, with dependent noun phrases inflecting for case. The primary morphosyntactic alignment of full noun phrases in Kalaallisut is ergative-absolutive, but verbal morphology follows a nominative-accusative pattern and pronouns are syntactically neutral.
The language distinguishes four persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th or 3rd reflexive (see Obviation and switch-reference); two numbers (singular and plural but no dual, unlike Inuktitut); eight moods (indicative, interrogative, imperative, optative, conditional, causative, contemporative and participial) and eight cases (absolutive, ergative, equative, instrumental, locative, allative, ablative and prolative). Greenlandic (including the eastern Tunumiisut variety) is the only Eskimo language having lost its dual.
Declension +CaseSingularPluralAbsolutive -∅ -tErgative -pInstrumental -mik -nikAllative -mut -nutAblative -mit -nitLocative -mi -niProlative -kkut -tigutEquative -tut
Verbs carry a bipersonal inflection for subject and object. Possessive noun phrases inflect for both possessor and case.
In this section, the examples are written in Greenlandic standard orthography except that morpheme boundaries are indicated by a hyphen.
Syntax