Alaska Native Languages

The language family with the largest number of speakers in Alaska is the Inuit-Yupik-Unangax̂ language family (also known as Eskimo-Aleut).

This family of languages stretches from the Far East of Siberia, through Alaska and Canada and all the way to eastern Greenland. Iñupiaq speakers in Alaska have shown some ability to communicate with Greenlandic speakers, despite the thousands of miles that separate these languages. Inuit-Yupik-Unangax̂ languages often have extremely long words that might be expressed by a whole sentence in English.

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See the table below for a comparison of Inuit-Yupik vocabulary: