page_title: Greenlandic language
section_title: Orthography
hierarchical_section_title: Greenlandic language / Orthography
caption_attribution_description: Dansk: En side fra C.W. Schultz-Lorentzens Grønlandske ordbog fra 1926 English: Kra (Κʻ / ĸ), a character formerly used to write the Kalaallisut language of Greenland, photo of a page in a Greenlandic-Danish dictionary Español: Detalle de una página de un diccionario groenlandés-danés donde se observa la letra kra (Κʻ/ĸ), utilizada anteriormente en la lengua groenlandesa occidental. Polski: ĸ (kra) litera alfabetu łacińskiego używana w języku grenlandzkim, wygląd w słowniku grenlandzko-duńskim
context_page_description: Greenlandic is an Eskimo–Aleut language with about 57,000 speakers, mostly Greenlandic Inuit people in Greenland. It is closely related to the Inuit languages in Canada, such as Inuktitut. The main variety, Kalaallisut, or West Greenlandic, has been the official language of the Greenlandic autonomous territory since June 2009; this is a move by the Naalakkersuisut to strengthen the language in its competition with the colonial language, Danish. The second variety is Tunumiit oraasiat, or East Greenlandic. The language of the Thule Inuit of Greenland, Inuktun or Polar Eskimo, is a recent arrival and a dialect of Inuktitut.
  Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language that allows the creation of long words by stringing together roots and suffixes. Its morphosyntactic alignment is ergative, meaning that it treats the argument of an intransitive verb like the object of a transitive verb, but distinctly from the agent of a transitive verb.
  Nouns are inflected for one of the eight cases and for possession. Verbs are inflected for one of the eight moods and for the number and person of its subject and object. Both nouns and verbs have complex derivational morphology.
context_section_description: Greenlandic is written with the Latin script.  The alphabet:
  A E F G I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V
  To spell loanwords from other languages, especially from Danish and English, the additional letters B, C, D, H, W, X, Y, Z, Æ, Ø and Å are used. Greenlandic uses the symbols "..." and »...« as quotation marks.
  From 1851 until 1973, Greenlandic was written in the alphabet invented by Samuel Kleinschmidt. This alphabet employed the special character kra (Κʼ / ĸ) which was replaced by q in the 1973 reform. In the Kleinschmidt alphabet, long vowels and geminate consonants were indicated by means of diacritics on the vowels (in the case of consonant gemination, the diacritics were placed on the vowel preceding the affected consonant). For example, the name Kalaallit Nunaat was spelled Kalâdlit Nunât. This scheme uses a circumflex accent ( ˆ ) to indicate a long vowel (e.g., ât/ît/ût, modern: aat, iit, uut), an acute accent ( ´ ) to indicate gemination of the following consonant: (i.e., á, í, ú modern: a(kk), i(kk), u(kk))] and, finally, a tilde ( ˜ ) or a grave accent ( ` ), depending on the author, indicates vowel length and gemination of the following consonant (e.g., ãt, ĩt, ũt or àt, ìt, ùt, modern: aatt, iitt, uutt). The letters ê and ô, used only before r and q, are now written ee and oo in Greenlandic. The spelling system of Nunatsiavummiutut, spoken in Nunatsiavut in northeastern Labrador, is derived from the old Greenlandic system.
  Technically, the Kleinschmidt orthography focused upon morphology: the same derivational affix would be written in the same way in different contexts, despite its being pronounced differently in different contexts. The 1973 reform replaced this with a phonological system: Here, there was a clear link from written form to pronunciation, and the same suffix is now written differently in different contexts. The differences are due to phonological changes. It is therefore easy to go from the old orthography to the new (cf. the online converter) whereas going the other direction would require a full lexical analysis.
caption: ĸ in a Greenlandic–Danish dictionary from 1926
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