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The Inuit languages can form very long words by adding more and more descriptive affixes to words. Those affixes may modify the syntactic and semantic properties of the base word, or may add qualifiers to it in much the same way that English uses adjectives or prepositional phrases to qualify nouns (e.g. "falling snow", "blowing snow", "snow on ...
The Inuit languages, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, exhibit a regular agglutinative and heavily suffixing morphology. The languages are rich in suffixes, making words very long and potentially unique. For example, in Nunavut Inuktitut:
The words Inuktitut, or more correctly Inuktut ('Inuit language') are increasingly used to refer to both Inuinnaqtun and Inuktitut together, or "Inuit languages" in English. [12] Nunavut is the home of some 24,000 Inuit, over 80% of whom speak Inuktitut. This includes some 3,500 people reported as monolinguals.
The first efforts to write Inuktitut came from Moravian missionaries in Greenland and Labrador in the mid-19th century using Latin script. The first book printed in Inuktitut using Cree script was an 8-page pamphlet known as Selections from the Gospels in the dialect of the Inuit of Little Whale River (ᒋᓴᓯᑊ ᐅᑲᐤᓯᐣᑭᐟ, "Jesus' words"), [4] printed by John Horden in 1855–56 ...
The claim that Eskimo words for snow are unusually numerous, particularly in contrast to English, is a cliché commonly used to support the controversial linguistic relativity hypothesis. In linguistic terminology, the relevant languages are the Eskimo–Aleut languages , specifically the Yupik and Inuit varieties.
Iñupiaq or Inupiaq (/ ɪ ˈ n uː p i æ k / ih-NOO-pee-ak, Inupiaq:), also known as Iñupiat, Inupiat (/ ɪ ˈ n uː p i æ t / ih-NOO-pee-at), Iñupiatun or Alaskan Inuit, is an Inuit language, or perhaps group of languages, spoken by the Iñupiat people in northern and northwestern Alaska, as well as a small adjacent part of the Northwest Territories of Canada.
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) says "Inuktut is the language of Inuit, spoken across Inuit Nunaat, which includes Greenland, Alaska and Inuit Nunangat in Northern Canada". [1] In Canada, according to ITK, it encompasses Inuvialuktun , Inuinnaqtun , Inuktitut , and Inuttut .
Eskaleut is polysynthetic, which features a process in which a single word is able to contain multiple post-bases or morphemes. The Eskaleut languages are exclusively suffixing (with the exception of one prefix in Inuktitut that appears in demonstratives). Suffixes are able to combine and ultimately create an unlimited number of words.