Family of languages spoken in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, U.S., and eastern Siberia by the Eskimo and Aleut peoples.
Aleut, distantly related to the Eskimo languages, consists of eastern and western dialects; today both are spoken by fewer than 400 people. The Eskimo languages have two subgroups: Yupik (five languages), spoken on the Chukchi Peninsula in Siberia and in southwestern Alaska; and Inupiaq-Inuktitut, a continuum of dialects spoken across arctic Alaska and Canada to the coasts of Labrador and Greenland. Yupik languages are spoken today by about 13,000 people, while Inupiaq-Inuktitut has more than 100,000 speakers, nearly half of whom speak Greenlandic Inuktitut.