ESKIMO-ALEUT LANGUAGES

family of languages spoken in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and eastern Siberia by the Eskimo and Aleut peoples. Aleut is a single language with two surviving dialects. Eskimo consists of two divisions: Yupik, spoken in Siberia and southwestern Alaska, and Inuit, spoken in northern Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Each division includes several dialects. Eskimo and Aleut are related but quite distinct languages; they have no known outside relatives. Aleut, now greatly reduced in number of speakers, is the smallest branch of the family. It was formerly a neighbouring language to Eskimo on the Alaska Peninsula. It is now spoken in the Aleutian Islands and in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, settled by Aleuts from 1800 on. Eskimo and Aleut have relatively simple sound systems. Yupik has four distinct vowels, while Inuit and Aleut have only three. Of the consonants, Eskimo has from 13 to 27, depending on the dialect. Eskimo is a highly inflected language and has a great number of suffixes but only one prefix and no compounds. In Aleut the word forms are simpler, but the syntactic constructions are more numerous. Suffixes are often accompanied by changes in the stem. Nouns are inflected for numbersingular, dual, and pluraland for possessor. The subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are both in the absolute case, whereas the subject of a transitive verb occurs in the relative case (also like a genitive). Verbal modes include indicative, interrogative, imperative, optative, participles, and other forms corresponding to subordinate clauses in English. Other modal relations and tenses are specified by derivational suffixes and in Aleut also by auxiliary verbs. A remarkable feature of the vocabulary is the great number of demonstratives, about 30 in western Eskimo and in Aleut. The possibility of derivation in Eskimo-Aleut is virtually unlimited, and the number of word stems is comparatively small. family of languages spoken in Greenland, Canada, Alaska (United States), and eastern Siberia (Russia), by the Eskimo and Aleut peoples. Aleut is a single language with two surviving dialects. Eskimo consists of two divisions: Yupik, spoken in Siberia and southwestern Alaska, and Inuit, spoken in northern Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Each division includes several dialects. The proposed relationship of Eskimo-Aleut with other language families, such as Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Uralic, and/or Indo-European, remains conjectural. Additional reading Bibliography, demographic data, and literacy programs are addressed in Dirmid R.F. Collis (ed.), Arctic Languages: An Awakening (1990). Linguistic information may be found in Anthony C. Woodbury, Eskimo and Aleut Languages, in William C. Sturtevant (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 5, Arctic, ed. by David Damas (1984), pp. 4963; Michael Fortescue, Steven Jacobson, and Lawrence Kaplan, Comparative Eskimo Dictionary with Aleut Cognates (1994); Michael Fortescue, West Greenlandic (1984); Steven Jacobson and Anna W. Jacobson, A Practical Grammar of the Central Alaskan Yup'ik Eskimo Language (1995); Joseph de Reuse, Siberian Yupik Eskimo: The Language and Its Contacts with Chukchi (1994); Steven A. Jacobson (compiler), Yup'ik Eskimo Dictionary (1984); and Knut Bergsland (compiler), Aleut Dictionary (1994). Knut Bergsland