Inuit

Inuit is the eastern branch of the Eskaleut family, a chain of closely related dialects stretching from Alaska through northern Canada and Labrador to Greenland, with Yupik its nearest relative. It is a polysynthetic, ergative language, building long words from roots and chains of suffixes.

Its early form was carried east by the Thule people, who spread out of Beringia across the Arctic archipelago from the twelfth century and replaced the older Dorset culture; by 1300 they had reached western Greenland, and their descendants arrived in the east as the Norse settlements there disappeared.

The first word lists were made in the 1600s. Paul Egede published the first Greenlandic dictionary in 1750 and the first grammar in 1760, fixing the Latin-script tradition of the Greenlandic variety.