Inupiatun

Inupiaq, Iñupiaq, Inupiak, Inupiat, or Inupiatun are a group of dialects of the Inuit language, spoken in northern and northwestern Alaska. Inupiaq language is a member of the Eskimo languages group. There are roughly 10,000 speakers of these dialects. The speakers are known as Inupiat.

Dialects

There are four main dialect divisions and these can be organized within two larger dialect collections:^[1]

Linguistics

The Inupiaq dialects, like other Eskimo-Aleut languages, represent a particular type of agglutinative language called a polysynthetic language: it "synthesizes" a root and various grammatical affixes to create long words with sentence-like meanings.

Inupiaq has three basic vowels: 'a', 'i', and 'u'. As short vowels, 'a' is pronounced like the 'u' in English 'nut', 'i' is like the 'ee' in the English word 'sleep' and 'u' is like the 'u' in the English word 'rule'. There are long forms of the values, written 'aa', 'ii', and 'uu'. In Inupiaq, long and short vowels must be distinguished because they make a difference in word meanings. Short vowels may be joined to produce the diphthongs 'ai', 'ia', 'au', 'iu', and 'ui'.

Inupiaq has 14 consonants. All stops are voiceless, which means that Inupiaq has the sounds of English 'p', 't' and 'k' but not the sounds of English 'b', 'd', 'g'. The consonant written in Alaska as 'q' is like the English 'k' but pronounced further back in the throat. The Inupiaq sound written in Alaska as 'g' is pronounced like a French 'r'.

Writing systems

Inupiaq was first written when explorers first arrived in Alaska and began recording words in the native languages. They wrote by adapting the letters of their own language to writing the sounds they were recording. Spelling was often inconsistent, since the writers invented it as they wrote. Unfamiliar sounds were often confused with other sounds, so that, for example, 'q' was often not distinguished from 'k' and long consonants or vowels were not distinguished from short ones.

Along with the Alaskan and Siberian Yupik, the Inupiat eventually adopted the written system based on Roman orthography (Qaliujaaqpait) that Moravian missionaries first developed in Greenland and Labrador. Independently of missionaries from the south, the Alaskans also developed a system of hieroglyphics, which unfortunately died with its creators.^[2]

In the 1946, Roy Ahmaogak, an Inupiaq Presbyterian minister from Barrow, worked with Eugene Nida, a member of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, to develop the current Inupiaq writing system based on the Roman alphabet. Although some changes have been made since its origin—most notably the change from 'k' to 'q'—the essential system was accurate and is still in use.

Inupiaq alphabet(Atchagat)

Footnotes

Contents

Dialects

Linguistics

Writing systems

Inupiaq alphabet(Atchagat)

Footnotes

Further reading

External links