Greenlandic Language - Orthography

Orthography

In contrast to most Eskimo–Aleut languages in Canada, Greenlandic is written with the Latin script and not with Inuktitut syllabics.

From 1851 and until 1973 Greenlandic was written in the orthography invented by Samuel Kleinschmidt. This orthography employed the special character kra (Κʻ / ĸ) which was replaced by q in the 1973 reform. In the Kleinschmidt orthography long vowels and geminate consonants were indicated by means of diacritics on the vowels (in the case of consonant gemination, the diacritics were placed on the vowel preceding the affected consonant). For example, the name Kalaallit Nunaat was spelled Kalâdlit Nunât. This scheme uses a circumflex accent ( ˆ ) to indicate a long vowel (e.g., ât/ît/ût, modern: aat, iit, uut), an acute accent ( ´ ) to indicate gemination of the following consonant: (i.e., á, í, ú modern: a(kk), i(kk), u(kk))] and, finally, a tilde ( ˜ ) or a grave accent ( ` ), depending on the author, indicates vowel length and gemination of the following consonant (e.g., ãt, ĩt, ũt or àt, ìt, ùt, modern: aatt, iitt, uutt). The letters ê and ô, used only before r and q, are now written er/eq and or/oq in Greenlandic. The spelling system of Nunatsiavummiutut, spoken in Nunatsiavut in northeastern Labrador, is derived from the old Greenlandic system.

Technically, the Kleinschmidt orthography focused upon morphology: the same derivational affix would be written in the same way in different contexts, despite its being pronounced differently in different contexts. The 1973 reform replaced this with a phonological system: Here, there was a clear link from written form to pronunciation, and the same suffix is now written differently in different contexts. The differences are due to phonological changes. It is therefore easy to go from the old orthography to the new (cf. the online converter) whereas going the other direction would require a full lexical analysis.

The alphabet for Greenlandic is: A E F G I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V. To spell loanwords from other languages, especially from Danish and English, the additional letters b, c, d, h, x, y, z, w, æ, ø and å are used. Greenlandic uses the symbols "..." and »...« as quotation marks.