Greenlandic
Language · official in 1 country
Since June 2009 Greenlandic has been the sole official language of Greenland, an Indigenous language of the Americas standing alone in law. Kalaallisut, its western variety and the written standard, is an Inuit language closely related to Inuktitut in Canada. It had about 57,000 native speakers in 2025 and is written in the Latin alphabet.
The language on record
- Own name
- kalaallisut
- ISO 639-1
- KL
- ISO 639-3
- KAL
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Inuit
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Greenlandic is official
Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Danish realm, is the one entry. Danish shared official status there until 2009, and Denmark itself recognises Greenlandic as a minority language.
About Greenlandic
How the Thule people brought it
Greenlandic reached the island with the Thule people in the 1200s; what the earlier Saqqaq and Dorset cultures spoke is unknown. The first descriptions date from the 1600s. After Danish missionaries arrived in the early 1700s, Paul Egede wrote the first dictionary in 1750 and the first grammar in 1760. Pressure from Danish grew from colonisation onwards, and in the 1950s Danish policy favoured Danish in secondary education and official business.
Why the Kleinschmidt spelling was replaced
The missionary linguist Samuel Kleinschmidt devised the first orthography in 1851. Sound changes over the following century left it far from speech, so a new spelling was introduced in 1973 to match the spoken standard, and literacy rose in the years after. The modern spelling shows how i and u open before uvular consonants: ui means husband, but ueqarpoq, she has a husband, is spelled with e and o.
What home rule changed
The home rule agreement of 1979 began a policy of Greenlandization, which made Greenlandic the language of education. Primary school is now taught only in Greenlandic, so Danish-speaking parents in Greenland raise bilingual children. The broadcaster Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa works in Greenlandic, and the newspapers Sermitsiaq and Atuagagdliutit merged in 2010. UNESCO still lists the language as vulnerable, and as the western standard has spread, the other dialects are considered endangered.
Which varieties Greenland counts
Kalaallisut, the western variety, has four subdialects, and the standard rests on the central one spoken from Sisimiut to Maniitsoq, around Nuuk. East Greenlandic, Tunumiit oraasiat, has simplified its consonant clusters further, while the Inughuit of the far north speak Inuktun, a recent arrival that belongs to Inuktitut.
Words built from suffixes
Greenlandic is polysynthetic: long words are strung together from roots and suffixes. Nouns take eight cases and verbs eight moods. A fourth person tracks a change of subject between clauses. The grammar has no tense in the usual sense; time comes from context and particles.
Common questions
Questions about Greenlandic
Is Greenlandic the same as Inuktitut?
No, but they are close relatives in the Inuit group of the Eskimo-Aleut family. Only the Inuktun of northern Greenland counts as a dialect of Inuktitut.
What does Kalaallisut mean?
It is the name of West Greenlandic, the variety that became the written standard and the official language. It is often used for Greenlandic as a whole.
Does Greenlandic have tenses?
Not in the usual sense. Time is shown by context, by particles such as yesterday or now, or by derivational suffixes, though some linguists argue the language always marks the future.
Is Danish still official in Greenland?
Not since June 2009, when the government of Greenland made Greenlandic the sole official language. Before that the two shared the status.