ABSTRACT
Eskimo-Aleut languages are not related to the other Indigenous languages of the Americas. They are believed to be relatively late arrivals from Siberia, sharing a similar grammatical structure and vocabulary. There are three varieties of Greenlandic: North Greenlandic, which has around 800 speakers, West Greenlandic, which has around 50,000 speakers and is the official variety of the language, and East Greenlandic, which has around 3,000 speakers. There is evidence of human settlement in Greenland dating back as far as 2500 bce. In the early 1700s, Greenland came under Danish control; the first written records of Greenlandic date to this period, when Danish and Norwegian missionaries and colonisers arrived in the country and began to document the language. West Greenlandic has an extremely rich system of word derivation, that is, the creation of new words by means of a combination of stems and suffixes. The grammatical explanations are accompanied by example phrases and sentences illustrating the points under examination.
