Greenlandic Language - Grammar

Grammar

The morphology of Greenlandic is highly synthetic and exclusively suffixing, with the exception of a single highly limited and fossilized demonstrative prefix. It creates very long words by means of adding strings of suffixes to a stem. In principle there is no limit to the length of a Greenlandic word, but in practice words with more than half a dozen derivational suffixes are not so frequent, and the average number of morphemes per word is 3 to 5. The language employs around 318 inflectional suffixes and between four and five hundred derivational ones.

There are few compound words, but lots of derivations. The grammar employs a mixture of head and dependent marking: both agent and patient are marked on the predicate and the possessor is marked on nouns, while dependent noun phrases inflect for case. The morphosyntactic alignment of Kalaallisut is ergative.

The language distinguishes four persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th or 3rd reflexive (see Obviation and switch reference), two numbers (singular and plural; no dual as in Inuktitut), eight moods (indicative, participial, imperative, optative, past subjunctive, future subjunctive and habitual subjunctive) and eight cases (absolutive, ergative, equative, instrumental, locative, allative, ablative and prolative). Verbs carry a bipersonal inflection for subject and object. Possessive noun phrases inflect for their possessor, as well as for case.

In this section the examples are written in Greenlandic standard orthography except that morpheme boundaries are indicated by a hyphen.