Inuktun is a language spoken by Inuit people from northwestern Greenland. The people – and by extension the language – suffered considerably in earlier years. In the late nineteenth century, American arctic explorer Robert Peary brought a group of six Inuit people, including two children, to New York at the request of American anthropologist Franz Boas, who hoped that studying them would prove some of his theories about cultural evolution.
In New York, this small group was housed in a museum as a public exhibit. Four of the six died within a year, of neglect and disease, after which their skeletons were put on display in the American Museum of Natural Science.
Unsurprisingly, Indigenous Greenlanders have tended to remain wary of researchers. However, texts by scholar Alfred Kroeber, who studied the Inuktun language in the late nineteenth century, give some insights into how the entirely oral language was spoken then, and how it has changed in the years since. Some researchers believe that the Inuktun people initially settled in Greenland as late as the 18th century. Contemporary linguist Andrew Garrett has found that Inuktun was then much more like North Canadian Inuit languages than it is today, suggesting the existence of complex cultural, communication, and migratory connections between the two regions.
Today, modern Inuktun is spoken by about 1000 inhabitants of Northwest Greenland, with most speakers also speaking standard Greenlandic, and many also Danish.
Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/four-children-in-winter-coats-stand-in-the-snow-VRcBV-tQNM8
