Tunumiisut


Tunumiisut, also known as East Greenlandic, is an Eskaleut language spoken by the Tunumiit in East Greenland. Researchers vary on whether to treat Tunumiit as a dialect within a Greenlandic dialect continuum, or if its differences are sufficient to consider it a distinct language. The largest town where it is the primary language is Tasiilaq on Ammassalik Island, with the island's name being derived from the West Greenlandic name of the town.

Classification

Tunumiisut is a member of the Inuit–Yupik–Unangan (Eskaleut) language family, which stretches across the Arctic from Siberia to Greenland. It is a member of the Inuit branch of the language family. Tunumiisut is one of three Inuit languages within Greenland, alongside Kalaallisut and Inuktun.
Tunumiisuit has the second-most speakers of the three, with around 3000 speakers in the 1990 census. This is more than Inuktun, but far less than the dominant form, Kalaallisut, which has tens of thousands of speakers. There is virtually no literature written in Tunumiisut, though there are orally-spread Tunumiisut folk tales and songs that have been written down as part of academic studies.
The differences between the Greenlandic languages are enough to limit mutual intelligibility, and they are greater than differences found between geographically adjacent dialects in the dialect continuum of Eskaleut languages in Alaska or Canada. Kalaallisut is the prestige dialect, and the standardized form of Greenlandic taught in schools. Speakers of Tunumiisut get some exposure to Kalaallisut from school, church, and media. But Tunumiisut is spoken in an isolated region of the eastern Greenlandic coast, and has substantial phonological differences from the other Greenlandic languages. As such, Tunumiisut speakers generally understand Kalaallisut better than Kalaallisut speakers understand Tunumiisut.

Phonology

Relationship to other dialects

Compared to Kalaallisut, Tunumiisut has a smaller phonological inventory. Kalaallisut,, and are all pronounced either as a voiced [alveolar lateral flap] or a long voiced alveolar stop . The most notable difference between Tunumiisut and Kalaallisut lies in the vowels, where displaces in some contexts, leading to changes in surrounding consonants as well. Inuktun also shows similar vowel shifts, leading them to be grouped together as "i-dialects" of Greenlandic.

Vowels

Like the other dialects of Greenlandic, Tunumiisut only has three underlying vowels:,, and, although these vowels have many allophones. For instance, // lowers to before uvular sounds, and fronts to between coronal sounds.

i-dialect

Tunumiisut uses substantially more // vowels than other Greenlandic dialects, replacing // in various contexts, leading it to be called an "i-dialect" of Greenlandic. This has been analyzed as a process of "delayed labialization", with the lip rounding that is a characteristic of the // sound instead shifting to the following consonant. Phonological processes then further differentiate the Tunumiisut words from other dialects. For instance, a consonant between two identical vowels is often deleted, leading to differences like the Tunumiisut word iik versus Kalaallisut inuk, where the vowel changing to also causes the intervocalic to be deleted.

Consonants

The following sounds may also occur as geminated; /pː, tː, kː, qː, sː, mː, nː, ŋː/.
  • /v/ may be heard as either , , or .
  • /l/ may also be heard as in initial positions.
  • Sounds /s, sː/ may also be heard as palatalized sounds when in palatal positions.
  • Sounds /k/ and /q/ may also have intervocalic allophones as and .
  • Nasals /ŋ, ɴ/ can be heard as nasalized fricatives in various environments.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Tunumiisut is substantially different from the other Greenlandic languages, due in part to lexical changes motivated by taboo avoidance. After someone's death, people avoided saying the person's name, and overlap between names and common nouns led to resulted in approximately 30% of the Greenlandic lexicon being replaced within Tunumiisut.
A few examples demonstrate some phonological differences between the Greenlandic languages on shared words. These include consonant/vowel cluster assimilation, the phonemic realizations of,, and, palatalization of, and other phonemic differences, which are bolded in the table below:
Kalaallisut
Tunumiisut
Inuktun
English
ippa'ssaqippatsaqikpaghaqyesterday
iluartuqilivartiqiluaqtaqcorrect
naajanaajanaujaseagull
qarsuqqartiqqarhuqarrow
is'iiliihieye
KalaallisutKalaattisitKalaallihutGreenlandic