MultiTree:

Name: West Greenlandic Alternate Names: Inuktitut, Greenlandic; Greenlandic; Kalaallisut; Inuit; Eskimo; Inupiat; Greenlandic (South); Greenlandic Kalaallisut; East Greenlandic; Tasiilaq; Greenlandic Eskimo; Inuktitut Spoken in: Denmark, Greenland Number of speakers: 47,800 in Greenland (1995 M. Krauss). 3,000 East Greenlandic, 44,000 West Greenlandic, 800 North Greenlandic. Population total all countries: 57,800 (Ethnologue) Number of speakers: 53000 (UNESCO) Number of speakers: 54800 (World Oral Literature Project) Code: kal Code Authority: ISO 639-3 Code Standard: SIL Families: Eskimo-Aleut Parent Subgroup: Eastern Eskimo; Inuit; Inuit-Inupiaq; Inupiaq; Iñupiaq-Inuktitut (inui) Child Dialects: Southwest Greenlandic (kal-swg) Scoresbysund; Ittoqqortoormiit (kal-sco) Northwest Greenlandic (kal-nwg) Upernavik (kal-upe) North Greenlandic; Polar Eskimo; Thule Inuit; Polar Greenlandic; Thule; Etah Eskimo; Northern Greenland (kal-pol) Brief Description: "Greenlandic is the English name for the Inuit (Eastern Eskimo) dialects of Greenland (the Inuit term is Kalaallisut). Of the 79 Inuit communities in Greenland, all but 17 are on the west coast, including the largest, Nuuk (Gothå), which has an Inuit population of 8,500. There is a significant dialect difference between the west coast settlements and those on the east coast, leading to a distinction between West Greenlandic and East Greenlandic. The five Thule communities in the far northwest of the island constitute a third dialect cluster, sometimes called Polar Eskimo. This dialect is closer to the speech of Baffin Island than to West or East Greenlandic, and is usually considered to be a variety of Eastern Canadian Inuktitut that has been influenced by standard Greenlandic. Greenland, which became an autonomous province associated with the Danish Commonwealth in 1979, has a population of about 56,000, approximately 10,000 of whom are Danes. The remaining 46,000 are Inuit, nearly all of them speakers of Greenlandic. Another 7,000 speakers of Greenlandic live in Denmark, most of them in Copenhagen." Victor Golla, Atlas of the World's Languaes 2007 pg. 15

Endangerment Status

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UNESCO Status: Vulnerable Ethnologue Status: Not listed Sutherland's Red List: Not listed