Yupik

Yupik is the western branch of the Eskaleut family, spoken by the Yupik peoples from the Chukotka Peninsula of Siberia across the Bering Sea to western and south-central Alaska. The Eskimoan and Aleut branches split some four thousand years ago, and the Yupik languages diverged from one another and from the Inuit languages around 1000 CE.

They are distinct enough not to be mutually intelligible: Central Alaskan Yup'ik covers the mainland from Norton Sound to the Alaska Peninsula and Nunivak Island, while Alutiiq is spoken on Kodiak and around Prince William Sound.

The languages had no written form until the early nineteenth century, when Russian missionaries and their Yupik assistants translated religious texts, later adopting a Latin alphabet brought from Greenland by Moravian missionaries.