Inuktun (English: Polar Eskimo, Danish: nordgrønlandsk, polareskimoisk, thulesproget, Kalaallisut: avanersuarmiutut) is the language of approximately 1,000 indigenous Inughuit, inhabiting the world's northernmost settlements in Qaanaaq and the surrounding villages in northwestern Greenland.
All speakers of Inuktun also speak Standard West Greenlandic and many also speak Danish and a few also English. Apart from the town of Qaanaaq, Inuktun is also spoken in the villages of Muriuhaq, Hiurapaluk, Qikiqtat, Qikiqtarhuaq, Havighivik (names given in Inuktun).
The language was first described by the explorers Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen who travelled through northern Greenland in the early twentieth century and established a trading post at Dundas in 1910. Inuktun does not have its own orthography and is not taught in schools. However, most of the inhabitants of Qaanaaq and the surrounding villages use Inuktun in their everyday communication.
The language is an Eskimo–Aleut language and dialectologically it is in between the Greenlandic Kalaallisut and the Canadian Inuktitut. The Polar Inuit were the last to cross from Canada into Greenland and they may have arrived as late as in the eighteenth century. The language differs from Kalaallisut by substituting Kalaallisut /s/ with an h-sound often pronounced like a palatal fricative as in German ich. Inuktun also allows more consonant combinations than Kalaallisut and has some minor grammatical and lexical differences.
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