Iñupiaq language

Iñupiaq—also called Inupiaq, Iñupiat, Inupiat, Iñupiatun, or Alaskan Inuit—is an Inuit language (or possibly a cluster of related languages) used by the Iñupiat people across northern and northwestern Alaska and into a small adjacent part of Canada’s Northwest Territories. It belongs to the Inuit–Yupik–Unangan family and shares varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with other Inuit languages spoken in Canada and Greenland. Roughly 2,000 people speak it, and it is considered threatened, since most speakers are aged 40 or older. Along with several other Indigenous languages, Iñupiaq holds official status in the State of Alaska.

Contact with English in the late 1800s began its decline. After the United States took control of Alaska and enforced English-only boarding schools, the number of Iñupiat who speak Iñupiaq dropped to a small minority. Many parents stopped teaching it to their children after the 1970s, fearing punishment for using the language. Today, revitalization efforts are underway in several communities.

The language’s ancestors may have been spoken in northern Alaska for as long as 5,000 years. Between 1,000 and 800 years ago, Inuit groups moved east from Alaska into Canada and Greenland, eventually covering the entire Arctic coast and much of the inland. Iñupiaq dialects are the most conservative forms of Inuit, having changed less than other Inuit languages.

In the mid-to-late 1800s, Russian, British, and American colonists made contact with the Iñupiat. In 1885, the U.S. territorial government appointed Rev. Sheldon Jackson as General Agent of Education. Under him, Iñupiat and all Alaska Natives were taught only in English, and speaking Iñupiaq or other Indigenous languages was forbidden and strictly punished. By the 1970s, most Iñupiat had stopped passing the language to their children out of fear.

In 1972, the Alaska Legislature passed a law requiring that any school with at least 15 students whose primary language is not English must have at least one teacher fluent in the students’ native language. Today, the University of Alaska Fairbanks offers bachelor’s degrees in Iñupiaq language and culture, and Kotzebue has a preschool-to-first-grade immersion school called Nikaitchuat Iḷisaġviat. In 2014, Iñupiaq became an official state language alongside English and 19 other Indigenous languages. That same year, Iñupiat linguist Edna Ahgeak MacLean published an Iñupiaq–English grammar and dictionary with over 19,000 entries; an online version followed. Facebook added Iñupiaq as a language option in 2018, and an Iñupiaq version of Wordle appeared in 2022.

The language has four main dialect divisions, grouped into two larger collections. Seward Peninsula Iñupiaq (spoken on the Seward Peninsula) may have a Yupik substrate and differs from other Inuit languages. It includes Qawiaraq and Bering Strait dialects. Northern Alaskan Iñupiaq is spoken from the Northwest Arctic and North Slope regions of Alaska to the Mackenzie Delta in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and includes Malimiut and North Slope dialects.

The Bering Strait dialect was once spoken on Big Diomede Island, but after World War II the Native population was moved to the Siberian mainland, and the next generation spoke Central Siberian Yupik or Russian. King Island’s entire population moved to Nome in the early 1960s. The Bering Strait dialect may also be spoken in Teller on the Seward Peninsula. The Qawiaraq dialect is spoken in Nome, and possibly in Koyuk, Mary’s Igloo, Council, and Elim; a Teller sub-dialect may be used in Unalakleet. Malimiutun has two sub-dialects found in Buckland, Koyuk, Shaktoolik, and Unalakleet, and may also be spoken in Deering, Kiana, Noorvik, Shungnak, and Ambler. Southern Malimiut is found in Koyuk, Shaktoolik, and Unalakleet; Northern Malimiut appears in other villages. The North Slope dialect includes Common North Slope, a mix of older local speech forms, and the Point Barrow dialect, which in 2010 was spoken only by a few elders. North Slope is also spoken in Kivalina, Point Lay, Wainwright, Atqasuk, Utqiaġvik, Nuiqsut, and Barter Island.

All Iñupiaq dialects have three basic vowel qualities, though no instrumental work has determined their allophones. Each can be short or long, creating six phonemic vowels; long vowels are written as double letters (⟨aa⟩, ⟨ii⟩, ⟨uu⟩). Diphthongs also occur, and no more than two vowels appear in sequence. The Bering Strait (Seward Peninsula) dialect has a fourth vowel, which preserves the proto-Eskimo vowel reconstructed as */ə/. In dialects without that fourth vowel, proto-Eskimo */e/ has merged with the closed front vowel. This merged vowel is called “strong i” and causes palatalization before consonant clusters in the North Slope dialect. The other vowel is called “weak i.” The orthography does not distinguish between strong and weak i, so palatalization can only be predicted by examining other processes that depend on the distinction.