Inupiaq language

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Inupiaq Inupiatun, Iñupiaq
Spoken in:	Alaska; formerly Big Diomede Island (Russia)
Total speakers:	approximately 3,500
Language family:	Eskimo-Aleut Inuit Inupiaq
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	`ik`
ISO 639-2:	`ipk`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	variously: `ipk` — Inupiaq (generic) `esi` — North Alaskan Inupiatun `esk` — Northwest Alaska Inupiatun
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Inupiaq, Iñupiaq, Inupiak or Inupiatun is a group of dialects of the Inuit language spoken in northern and northwestern Alaska. There are roughly 10,000 speakers of these dialects; the people are known as Inupiat.

Alaskan Inupiaq has three major dialect groups, and five dialects.

The North Alaskan group includes:

1. The North Slope dialect, spoken along the Arctic coast as far south as Kivalina.

2. The Malimiut dialect, spoken south of Kivalina and around Kotzebue, along the Kobuk River and at the head of the Norton Sound, in Koyuk and Unalakleet.

Around the Anatuvuk Pass:

3. The Nunamiu dialect.

The Seward Peninsula group:

4. The Bering Strait dialect, spoken on King Island and the Diomedes and in the villages north of Nome.

5. The Qawiaraq dialect, spoken in Teller, near the original village of Qawiaraq, and in the villages south of Nome as far as Unalakleet.

[edit] Linguistics

The Inupiaq dialects, like other Eskimo-Aleut languages, represent a particular type of agglutinative language called a polysynthetic language: it "synthesizes" a root and various grammatical affixes to create long words with sentence-like meanings.

Inupiaq has three basic vowels: 'a', 'i', and 'u'. As short vowels, 'a' is pronounced like the 'u' in English 'nut', 'i' is like the 'ee' in the English word 'sleep' and 'u' is like the 'u' in the English word 'rule'. There are long forms of the values, written 'aa', 'ii', and 'uu'. In Inupiaq, long and short vowels must be distinguished because they make a difference in word meanings. Short vowels may be joined to produce the diphthongs 'ai', 'ia', 'au', 'iu', and 'ui'.

Inupiaq has 14 consonants. All stops are voiceless, which means that Inupiaq has the sounds of English 'p', 't' and 'k' but not the sounds of English 'b', 'd', 'g'. The consonant written in Alaska as 'q' is like the English 'k' but pronounced further back in the throat. The Inupiaq sound written in Alaska as 'g' is pronounced like a French 'r'.

[edit] Writing systems

Inupiaq was first written when explorers first arrived in Alaska and began recording words in the native languages. They wrote by adapting the letters of their own language to writing the sounds they were recording. Spelling was often inconsistent, since the writers invented it as they wrote. Unfamiliar sounds were often confused with other sounds, so that, for example, 'q' was often not distinguished from 'k' and long consonants or vowels were not distinguished from short ones.

In the 1946, Roy Ahmaogak, an Inupiaq Presbyterian minister from Barrow, worked with Eugene Nida, a member of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, to develop the current Inupiaq writing system based on the Roman alphabet. Although some changes have been made since its origin—most notably the change from 'k' to 'q'—the essential system was accurate and is still in use.