Eskaleut

The Eskaleut, or Eskimo–Aleut, family is the language family of the Arctic rim, stretching from the Aleutian Islands and Alaska across northern Canada to Greenland and across the Bering Strait to the Chukchi Peninsula. It has two branches: Aleut, a single much-dialected language of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands, and Eskimoan, which splits into the Yupik languages and the Inuit dialect continuum, whose outermost varieties are scarcely mutually intelligible.

These polysynthetic, heavily suffixing tongues are not demonstrably related to any other North American family; linguists take them to mark the last prehistoric migration from Asia, ancestral to the Thule peoples.

The ancestral language is estimated to have divided into Aleut and Eskimoan at least 4000 years ago, while Yupik and Inuit diverged roughly 1000 years ago, as Inuit groups spread eastward through the Arctic over the following centuries.