Overview of Comparative Inuit-Yupik-Unangan

The Inuit-Yupik-Unangan family is one of the major language families of the world, with member languages spoken from the Russian Far East to the east coast of Greenland. Due to the pejorative nature of the term "Eskimo" in some locales, and the increasing preference for "Unangan" as opposed to "Aleut" in Alaska, this family may be alternately referred to as Inuit-Yupik-Unangan. The hyphenated term gives some sense of the variety of languages subsumed under this family label.

Most of the diversity within this family is found in southwest Alaska. In contrast, the Inuit language forms a dialect complex spanning from Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait across the arctic to Eastern Greenland.

The Archive contains an extensive collection of comparative materials on these languages. A singularly important publication is the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary, recently revised and available through the ANLC Press.