Inuit Language - Morphology and Syntax

Morphology and Syntax

For a more detailed description specific to Nunavut Inuktitut, see Inuit grammar.

The Inuit language, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, has a very rich morphological system, in which a succession of different morphemes are added to root words (like verb endings in European languages) to indicate things that, in languages like English, would require several words to express. (See also: Agglutinative language and Polysynthetic language) All Inuit language words begin with a root morpheme to which other morphemes are suffixed. The language has hundreds of distinct suffixes, in some dialects as many as 700. Fortunately for learners, the language has a highly regular morphology. Although the rules are sometimes very complicated, they do not have exceptions in the sense that English and other Indo-European languages do.

This system makes words very long, and potentially unique. For example in central Nunavut Inuktitut:

tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga

I can't hear very well.

This long word is composed of a root word tusaa- 'to hear' followed by five suffixes:

-tsiaq-	well
-junnaq-	be able to
-nngit-	not
-tualuu-	very much
-junga	1st pers. singular present indicative non-specific

This sort of word construction is pervasive in Inuit language and makes it very unlike English. In one large Canadian corpus – the Nunavut Hansard – 92% of all words appear only once, in contrast to a small percentage in most English corpora of similar size. This makes the application of Zipf's law quite difficult in the Inuit language. Furthermore, the notion of a part of speech can be somewhat complicated in the Inuit language. Fully inflected verbs can be interpreted as nouns. The word ilisaijuq can be interpreted as a fully inflected verb: "he studies", but can also be interpreted as a noun: "student". That said, the meaning is probably obvious to a fluent speaker, when put in context.

The morphology and syntax of the Inuit language vary to some degree between dialects, and the article Inuit language morphology and syntax describes primarily central Nunavut dialects, but the basic principles will generally apply to all of them and to some degree to Yupik as well.