The Eskaleut, Eskimo–Aleut or Inuit–Yupik–Unangan languages are a language native to the northern portions of the North American continent, and to a small part of northeastern Asia. The language family is also known as Eskaleutian, or Eskaleutic.
Languages in the family are indigenous to parts of what are now the United States Alaska; Canada (Inuit Nunangat) including Nunavut,
Northwest Territories (principally in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region) northern Quebec (Nunavik), and northern Labrador (Nunatsiavut); Greenland; and they also include Russian Far East (Chukchi Peninsula).
The Eskaleut language family is divided into two branches: Eskimoan and Aleut. The Aleut branch consists of a single language, Aleut, spoken in the Aleutian Islands and the Pribilof Islands. Aleut is divided into several dialects.
The Eskimoan languages are divided into two branches: the Yupik languages, spoken in western and southwestern Alaska and in Chukotka, and the Inuit languages, spoken in northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland.
Inuit languages, which cover a huge range of territory, are divided into several varieties. Neighboring varieties are quite similar, although those at the farthest distances from the center in the Diomede Islands and East Greenland are quite divergent.
The proper place of one language, Sirenik, within the Eskimoan family has not uet been settled. While some see it as a branch of Yupik, others list it as a separate branch of the Eskimoan family, alongside the Yupik and Inuit languages.
The Alaska Native Language Center believes that the common ancestral language of the Eskimoan languages and of Aleut divided into the Eskimoan and Aleut branches at least 4,000 years ago.
The Eskimoan language family split into the Yupik and Inuit branches around 1,000 years ago. Recent classifications find a third branch, Old Sirenik.
The Eskaleut languages are among the native languages of the Americas. This is a geographical category, not a genealogical one. The Eskaleut languages are do not seem to be related to the other language families and are believed to represent a separate, and the last prehistoric migration of people from Asia.
Alexander Vovin (2015) notes that northern Tungusic languages, which are spoken in eastern Siberia and northeastern China, have Eskaleut loanwords that are not found in Southern Tungusic, implying that Eskaleut was once much more widely spoken in eastern Siberia. Vovin (2015) estimates that the Eskaleut loanwords in Northern Tungusic had been borrowed no more than 2,000 years ago, which was when Tungusic was spreading northwards from its homeland in the middle reaches of the Amur River. Vovin (2015) concludes that the homeland (Urheimat) of Proto-Eskaleut was in Siberia rather than in Alaska. See Wikipedia
Notes & Bibliography
"Due to the pejorative nature of the term 'Eskimo' in some locales, and the increasing preference for 'Unangan' as opposed to 'Aleut' in Alaska, this family may be alternately referred to as Inuit–Yupik–Unangan. The hyphenated term gives some sense of the variety of languages subsumed under this family label." Holton, Gary. 2012. Overview of Comparative Inuit–Yupik–Unangan.
Cf. Fleming 1987.
Kaplan, Lawrence (1984). McGary, Jane (ed.). Inupiaq and the Schools – A Handbook for Teachers. Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
"Ethnologue report for Yupik Sirenk", Ethnologue.
"Alaska Native Languages – An Overview" Archived 2008-05-09 at the Wayback Machine.
Jacobson, Steven (1984). Central Yupik and the Schools – A Handbook for Teachers. Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Stern, Pamela (2009). The A to Z of the Inuit. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Dorais, Louis-Jacques. 2010. The Language of the Inuit: Syntax, Semantics, and Society in the Arctic. McGill-Queen's University Press
Vovin, Alexander. 2015. Eskimo Loanwords in Northern Tungusic. Iran and the Caucasus 19 (2015), Leiden: Brill.
Bibliography
Bergsland, Knut (1997). Aleut Grammar: Unangam Tunuganaan Achixaasix̂. Alaska Native Language Center.
Bernet, John W. (1974). An Anthology of Aleut, Eskimo, and Indian Literature of Alaska in English Translation. Fairbanks: University of Alaska.
Booij, Geert; Lehmann, Christian; Mugdan, Joachim; Skopeteas, Stavros, eds. (2004). Morphologie / Morphology. Vol. 2. Walter de Gruyter
Compton, Richard (2024). "Inuit-Yupik-Unangan: An overview of the language family". In Carmen Dagostino; Marianne Mithun; Keren Rice (eds.). The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America: A Comprehensive Guide. Vol. 2. Berlin, Boston
Crowley, Terry; Bowern, Claire (2010). An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dumond, Don E. (1965). "On Eskaleutian Linguistics, Archaeology, and Prehistory". American Anthropologist. 67 (5)
Fleming, Harold C. (1987). "Towards a definitive classification of the world's languages."
Fortescue, Michael D. (1984). Some Problems Concerning the Correlation and Reconstruction of Eskimo and Aleut Mood Markers. København: Institut for Eskimologi, Københavns Universitet.
Fortescue, Michael D.; Jacobson, Steven A.; Kaplan, Lawrence D. (1994) Comparative Eskimo Dictionary with Aleut Cognates. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
Fortescue, Michael (1998). Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence. London: Cassell.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (2000). Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Vol. 1: Grammar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (2002). Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Vol. 2: Lexicon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gutman, Alejandro; Avanzati, Beatriz (2013). "Eskimo–Aleut Languages". The Language Gulper. Archived from the original on 2023-10-08.
Hamp, Eric P., ed. (1976). Papers on Eskimo and Aleut Linguistics. Conference on Eskimo Linguistics. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Holst, Jan Henrik (2005). Einführung in die eskimo-aleutischen Sprachen (in German). Hamburg: Buske.
Johns, Alana (2014). "Eskimo–Aleut". The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology.
Marsh, Gordon H. (1956). The Linguistic Divisions of the Eskimo–Aleut Stock.
Miyaoka, Osahito (2012). A grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY). Mouton Grammar Library. Vol. 58.
Swift, Mary D. (2004). Time in Child Inuktitut: A Developmental Study of an Eskimo–Aleut Language. Studies on Language Acquisition. Vol. 24. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
