Peter Lang, 2015

This book serves as an insightful ethnographic introduction to the language and oral traditions of the Inugguit, a sub-group of the Inuit who live in north-west Greenland. A unique work, it encompasses an overview of the grammar of Polar Eskimo – a language spoken by about 770 people – as well as a description of their oral traditions (drum-dancing and story-telling) and the most extensive glossary of the language compiled to date. The book presents the Polar Eskimo language in the orthography established by the author in conjunction with the local community in Greenland, an extremely difficult task for a language made up of such an aberrant phonology and with no written tradition. By exploring their ways of speaking and ways of belonging, Leonard provides an original ethnographic interpretation of the nature of Inugguit social organization and their world-view. Some Ethnolinguistic Notes on Polar Eskimo will serve as an invaluable resource for linguists who specialise in the Eskimo-Aleut group and will be of much interest to anthropologists working in the Arctic region

Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2018

The relationship between Unangam Tunuu (Aleut) and Eskimo was established in the early 19th century, and the 20th century especially saw a number of efforts on the reconstruction of Proto-Eskimo-Aleut (PEA). Reconstruction has supported assumptions of a largely genealogical relationship between the EA languages, assumptions which include a long history of independent development in isolation from other languages and language families. The reconstruction of PEA, however, is incomplete; many apparent cognates have irregular or imperfectly understood sound correspondences. Furthermore, advances in archaeology and genetics have called into question many assumptions about EA prehistory and about the isolation or lack thereof of Unangam Tunuu. In this study, I reexamine the proposed cognates and evaluate them based on the strength of their correspondences and their distribution within the lexicon, with reference to new findings regarding technological innovations and periods of cultural contact. Several patterns emerge, including a large group of proposed cognates with overly-specific semantic correlations relating to technologies or cultural practices postdating the split of EA languages, a gender-based difference in the number of cognates relating to cultural activities, and a correlation between known borrowings and high levels of cognates in certain semantic domains. Results suggest extensive language contact, especially in the past millennium.

This article surveys several Eskimo loanwords in Tungusic. Since they are found exclusively in Northern Tungusic languages, in all probability these loanwords represent a relatively late contact between Northern Tungusic and Eskimo speakers that was likely to take place no earlier than two thousand years ago, when speakers of proto-Northern Tungusic migrated to the North from the Tungusic Urheimat located around the mid-stream of Amur river. This fact is important not only for the Tungusic linguistic history, but also for Eskimo one, because it demonstrates that Eskimo languages were much more widely spread in North-East Asia outside of their historically attested locality on the Asiatic shore of Bering straight.

Études/Inuit/Studies, 2000

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Modifications in the spoken language of the Inuit of Northern Ungava, the Takamiut - now part of Nunavik - at a time when Inuit were beginning to settle into villages. Based on research in 1959, 1960 and 1963-64 before any formal English schooling or bilingualism, but following fifty years of sporadic contact with missionaries ad traders.

Language Sciences, 1991

Études/Inuit/Studies, 2000

Études/Inuit/Studies, 2000

C.C. Uhlenbeck was a Dutch linguist especially known for his work on comparative Indo-European linguistics, Basque and the Blackfoot Algonquian language. However, he also made some groundbreaking contributions to the comparative linguistic study of the Eskimo-Aleut family. Uhlenbeck was the first to suggest that the Eskimo language family and the Aleut language represent daughter branches of a common ancestor. Also, he was the first who approached the possible relationships between the Eskimo-Aleut language family and the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families in a systematic manner in publications. His work attracted the attention of Eskimologists like Bergsland, Fortescue, Hammerich and Thalbitzer, and it put these long-distance comparative issues on the research agenda. Uhlenbeck never did any fieldwork on Eskimo-Aleut and his work is based entirely on sources written by others. His Eskimo-Aleut work is not generally known, since, being written mainly in Dutch, it is ...

A sucking calf under the ox: “The Turkic Tracks in an Eskimo Language” Öküzün Altında Aranan Buzağı: “Bir Eskimo Dilinde Türkçenin İzleri”

Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)

Across Alaska, the popularity of indigenous forms of dance has risen, particularly in indigenous communities in which English dominates the heritage languages and Native youth have become monolingual English speakers. Some indigenous people say that Native dance accompanied by indigenous song is a way of preserving their endangered languages. With two case studies from Alaskan Eskimo communities, Yupiget on St. Lawrence Island and Iñupiat in Barrow, this article explores how use of endangered languages among Alaskan Eskimos is related to the activity of performing Eskimo dance. I suggest that practice of Eskimo dancing and singing that local people value as an important linguistic resource can be considered as a de-globalised sociolinguistic phenomenon, a process of performance and localisation in which people construct a particular linguistic repertoire withdrawn from globalisable circulation in multilingualism.