Lesser-Known Languages (LKL): Alutiiq
A magnificent Eskimo language from the confines of Alaska.
The indigenous languages of North America have always been a curious topic of interest for me.
After all, there are over 500 widely different languages in areas with completely different weathers as well as rich and vibrant cultures of indigenous communities.
Due to the immense oppression they faced, I came to believe that writing about them as an outsider might be somehow incorrect.
And yet, I firmly believe this shouldn’t hold me back from delving into the wonders of these cultures and languages.
So, this month, we're embarking on an exciting journey to explore another lesser-known language. A language from a family many have heard of: the “Eskimo family”.
We’ve all heard of the “Eskimos.”
Like most people who grew up in the 90s, I grew up seeing common Eskimo stereotypes in cartoons and movies.
In fact, researching this piece made me realize I hadn’t heard the term in quite a while. And it makes sense because it is now considered outdated and even offensive as, along with other reasons, it encompasses many different cultures under one umbrella.
Still, the term Eskimo is still used in one context: the language family of our language of today: the Alutiiq language.
I actually lied a bit above. The language family isn’t the Eskimo family but the Eskimo-Aleut Family1.
The Eskimo-Aleut family (sometimes called Eskaleut) has two divisions: the Aleut language spoken in the Aleutian islands of Alaska2 and the Eskimo branch. Within this branch, we can find both the Inuit languages—that include the well-known Inuktitut language—and the Yupik languages, one of which is the Alutiiq.
As someone who had kept from looking into languages of North America, my first surprise was to find out that only Inuktitut used the peculiar script most of us have seen online.3 Instead, Alutiiq has taken the Roman alphabet and adapted its phonology to suit the sounds of the language.
Today, let’s discover why this little-known language really deserves to be in the spotlight.
Before we dive in, here’s one detail to take into account. While the term Alutiiq is usually used in English to refer to the people who speak Alutiiq, it actually refers to one single person in the Alutiiq language. There is a dual term (meaning for two people): Alutiik and a plural term for whenever we’re talking about more than two people: Alutiit.
In general, I’ll switch back and forth from saying “Alutiiq people” to “Alutiit.”
Alright, let’s dive into the Alutiit’s history first.
Beginnings and Russian colonization
The earliest evidence of the Alutiit dates back to 7,500 years ago. It was found in approximately 65 villages and camps in Alaska in the Kodiak Archipelago.
The first period before colonization is known as Ocean Bay and lasted until about 1800 BC. Characterized by a nomadic lifestyle in tents as the Alutiiq people moved around to follow harvests. This period laid the foundation for subsequent cultural and technological developments in the region
This was then followed by the Kachemak period all the way until 1400 AD. During this period, the Alutiit’s lifestyle evolved. Instead of living a very nomadic lifestyle, they began building seasonal communities in larger sod houses. Their tools and techniques also further evolved as traces suggest.
Finally, from 1400 to 1784, the Koniag period noted a shift in how people lived. A change in their climate mainly caused this evolution. During this period, the Alutiiq people began trading with the surrounding communities and developed more complex ceremonies and arts.
To survive in the harsh environment of the Kodiak Archipelago, the Alutiit cultivated crucial skills like hunting, ocean navigation, using plants as medicine, as well as reading starts, currents, winds, and animal behavior. These were all transferred from generation to generation through rites and stories.
The first Russian outpost in Alaska was established in 1784 by a fur trader named Shelikhov in Three Saints Bay.
Following a few trades and frequent battles, Shelikhov massacred and conquered the Alutiiq people on August 14 of the same year. This was the beginning of a harsh colonization that left a mark still felt today on the Alutiit culture.
Two years later, the first school in Alaska was built with the goal of educating the Alutiiq to better control them. Men were taken away to hunt. Women and children were left alone and struggled to survive or transfer knowledge to future generations.
Some children were also brought to Russia to educate, only to never make it back alive.
In 1817, an orthodox monk brought from Russia fled Kodiak to establish a school free of control from Russia and protect the Alutiit. Father Herman, like the other monks brought, was horrified by the acts committed against the locals.
Herman and the other monks translated many biblical texts into Alutiiq and other local languages, leaving a trace of the Orthodox bilingual education from 1790 all the way into the 1960s.
Out of the original 65 villages, only 7 were left at the end of the Russian occupation as all the Alutiiq people had been relocated after numerous flu epidemics and a smallpox one (1837-40) killing countless people. It is safe to say the foreigners entering the region brought diseases that locals weren’t physically capable of surviving.
American occupation and revitalization
In 1867, the United States bought Alaska at 2 cents per acre from Russia and kicked off an “English Only” policy through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).
While the Alutiit had been occupied for close to a hundred years, they had never lost the multilingualism caused by their interaction with the surrounding communities. Instead, most were at least trilinguals speaking Alutiiq, Russian, and English.
The English Only policy caused the Sugt’stun speakers (a dialect of Alutiiq also known as Chugach Alutiiq) to fall to 33 in 2012 according to this research paper. ((check data))
Other well-meaning people such as the Baptist Church were engaged in supporting the Alutiiq people but they also based their actions on assumptions of similar core values. This causes many Alutiit to lose touch with their own culture and identity.
Boarding schools also contributed to pushing further assimilation into the American culture. Boarding schools in America are well-known for having ruined the culture and language of many generations of countless indigenous populations. The Alutiiq people were unfortunately part of those.
If you want to learn more about the impact of boarding schools on indigenous cultures, I highly recommend this documentary and this one.
And yet, the Alutiit are now trying to revive their culture and language by using it at home and through activities.
Culture-based summer camps have been organized on the island since 1995. Children books like The Red Cedar of Afognak are also being published to teach about the community’s culture to the youth. Since 2000, the regional gathering Esgarlluku Taquka’aq (Awakening Bear) has also helped spread cultural knowledge.
Talking about the language, let’s get into it!
Alutiiq language basic facts
The Aluutiq language was originally solely an oral language with no set system to write it.
It’s also a is a free-word order language, which means words can appear in pretty much any order the speaker wants. This makes sense as the language uses a lot of cases and markers as we’ll soon see.
Its first writing system, using Cyrillic letters, was therefore developed when they were occupied by the Russians. Although it stopped being taught when the US bought Alaska, this system stayed in use until the 20th century.
The current writing system uses 26 letters from the Roman alphabet. 7 of the 22 consonants are symbol combinations though (gw, hm, hn, hng, kw, ll, and ng). The pronunciation of all letters can sound quite different from their English counterpart though, such as the c which sounds more like “tch” as in “catch.”
Only one letter was kept from Russian: the “Russian R.” It is only used for words borrowed from English and Russian.
Here’s the full alphabet pronounced, taken from the Alutiiq Museum website:
There are only four vowels: a, e, i, and u. The “o” sound doesn’t exist.
Among those, a, i, and u are considered “prime vowels” and the e is considered a “reduced vowel.” The difference is three-fold:
Prime vowels can be combined to create diphthongs like ai, ua, or iu for example while e cannot.
Prime vowels can be lengthened (aa, ii, or uu) while e cannot.
The reduced vowel e cannot appear at the end of a word.
In general, the vowel is devoiced and replaced by an apostrophe in the following syllables: t’s, t’ll, k’g, q’g, and q’r as in Alik’gkii (“He was afraid of it”).
This example might make you wonder how one word made an entire sentence.
This is because the Alutiiq language is an agglutinative language. Like a few of the languages we saw last month in South America, such as Aymara or Ch’ol, Alutiiq relies on affixes to create meaning.
Every word has a root to which can be added an infix (a particle within the word) or a suffix (a particle at the end of the word). Let’s take a new example: Taangarturtaartua. (I always drink water.)
Taangaq means “water” but the q disappears when a suffix is added.
r is the letter replacing the q at the end of nouns when there’s more after.
tur is the root of the verb “to eat/drink.”
-taar- is an infix meaning the subject “always does [verb].”
-tua is a verb ending indicating the first person in the present tense.
Changing this sentence slightly, we could get Taangaryugtua. (I want water.) where -yug- is an infix meaning “to want V/N.”
Whenever I encounter an agglutinative language, I truly wonder how people can swiftly create long sentences without taking a beat. This feels like a feat worth noting.
Truly fascinating.
Finding roots
As each word is modified from its root part, one of the most important tasks in Alutiiq is to figure out what the root of nouns and verbs is. Luckily, knowing a few rules can solve this.
To find a noun’s root, you just need to know if the noun ends…
in q → drop the q to get the root and add r- if suffix starts with vowel
in k → drop the k to get the root and add g- if suffix starts with vowel
in n → drop the n to get the root and add te- if suffix starts with vowel (some exceptions do exist though)
in ta → drop the a to get the root and add e- if more comes after
with any other consonant (rare): no particular pattern
As for verbs, they all finish in -luni (intransitive verbs) or -luku (transitive verbs). The same rules apply to both types. You just need to look at the last letter before -luni or -luku:
a vowel → just drop the final part
allangaluni (to be different) → allanga-
g or r and only one syllable before the ending → drop the final part and add e
nerluni (to eat) → nere-
g or r and more than one syllable before the ending → just drop the final part
qawarluni (to sleep) → qawar-
any consonant (except g or r) → drop the final part and add e
wamluni (to play) → wame-
If the verb ends in -lluni or -lluku though, you need to take that part off and add te, as in erlluni (to dawn (the day)) → erte-.
There are a few exceptions for verbs too but these can be learned one by one.
Knowing these 10 simple rules is the basis for everything else in Alutiiq, as we’ll now see.
Plurals
Alutiiq is one of those languages that make a distinction between types of plural. Compared to English, it can simply be explained as having one extra plural: the dual plural to indicate a number of two, as in “us two” or “the two xx.”
While I had never heard of such of thing until I began this lesser-known language series, I find this is rather common around the world, ranging from famous languages like Arabic and Hebrew to most obscure (yet equally fascinating) ones like Yidiny or Khanty.
When it comes to Alutiiq, it’s actually often quite easy to recognize. Most nouns end in q in their singular form (even though there are indeed others as we saw above).
To create the dual form, the q is replaced by a k. To create the plural form, the q is replaced by a t.
As for the rest of the nouns:
The ones ending in k keep a k in dual form and add a t in the plural. Some may change the vowel before the k too. For example, ak and ik become iit in the plural.
The ones whose noun root finishes with a vowel add a k in dual form, and a t in the plural.
Not too complicated, right?
Pronouns
If you thought pronouns would be a tad more complex than in English in Alutiiq, you guessed right. Indeed, its dual system means there aren’t just two first-person, second-person, and third-person pronouns but three!
This being said, as verbs are conjugated in Alutiiq, these only appear when a special need to put an emphasis arises (or in phrases without a verb).
Conjugation and verb suffixes
Alutiiq has an intricate conjugation system that jungles suffixes and verb endings. In comparison to the system we saw in the agglutinative language Aymara, it’s quite straightforward.
And yet, for some reason, finding information about conjugation itself in Alutiiq proved to be the hardest task of all to write this piece. Every mention of verbs in documents and online only talked about finding the stem and all the examples I found only used the first person singular or one of the three third persons.
After digging deep, I found one single resource about digging deep into verbs: the Grammar of Koniag Alutiiq. A 362-page document from 1978 more detailed than anything else available.
Here’s my attempt at explaining in a few words the basics of intransitive verbs. First, here’s a table of the four most important conjugations:
As you can observe, there is a special ending for the indicative past when it comes after a negative suffix. The Present tense, however, keeps the same ending.
We can therefore get conjugations like:
Katagtua. → I fall
Katan’itua → I don’t fall (where n’i indicates negation)
Katallianga. → I fell
Katan’ilngua → I didn’t fall (where n’i indicates negation)
From there on, Alutiiq uses suffixes to express details and more tenses. For instance, you may have noticed there was no future tense in the table above. That’s because the suffix -ciqe needs to be inserted after the verb root. Keeping with our example of falling, Kataciquq means “He will fall.” (The e is dropped from all suffixes when followed.)
But there are more!
Here are just a few with one or two examples each:
-yug-/-cug-: to want V/N
Riisaryugtua. → I want rice.
Qawaryugtuq. → He wants to sleep.
-suarte-: might V
Qetgersuartut. → They (dual) might jump.
-ngnaqe-: try to V
Aw’arngaqtukut. - We (3+) are trying to move (aside)
-kau-: can V, to be able to V
Agkau’ut → They (dual) can go.
Igarkau’uten → You (sing.) can write.
-taar-: to habitually/usually/always V
Gwa wam’taartua. → I used to play here.
We’re not covering the transitive ones because the system is a tad more complex: each verb ending changes based on both the subject and object. Here’s just one example for the indicative present:
Subject 2nd person sing. + Object 3rd person sing. → -an
Subject 2nd person sing. + Object 3rd person dual → -agken
Subject 2nd person dual + Object 3rd person sing. → -artek
Subject 2nd person dual + Object 3rd person dual → -atek
And that’s if we’re ignoring the 2nd and 3rd person plural!
Again, if you want to know more about the transitive verb conjugation system, check this textbook.
For now, let’s turn to a few more suffixes going on nouns instead.
Other important suffixes
As mentioned earlier, almost every component of Alutiiq is made of suffixes (often called postbases too) added after a noun or verb root.
To close today’s grammar section, let’s turn to a few interesting ones going on nouns:
-sinaq : big [Noun]
Quyanaasinaq → Thank you very much (Big thanks)
Yaasiisinaq → a big box
-nguaq : small [Noun], little [Noun]
Yaasiinguaq → a little box
-men: to [Noun] | -mek: from [Noun]
Qik’rtamen ag’uq. → He’s going to the island.
Tai stuulumen! → Come to the table!
Stuulumek qetgerllrianga. → I jumped from the table.
-wik: a place for [Verb]-ing
kenirwik → a place for cooking = a kitchen (from verb kenirluni)
nerwik → a place to eat = a restaurant (from nerluni)
-(r)pakat : many/too many…
englurpakat → many houses (from engluq)
igarwigpakat → many desks (from igawirk)
Many many more postbases exist. If you want to discover even more, this website lists quite a few more, each with at least one example!
Example sentences
Cama’i → Hello
Quyanaa → Thank you
Asirtuten-qaa? → How are you?
[You are good-Yes/No?]-qaa creates a yes/no question (closed questions) and is added to the first word of the sentence. It can also be omitted when speaking if the intonation is rising as done sometimes in English.
Tang’rciqamken → I’ll see you later. (Equivalent to “Goodbye”)
Liicun'itua. → I don’t want to learn.
Kinaq taugna? → Who is that?
[who - that]Kinaq-mi taugna? → Who is that (I wonder)?
-mi indicates a mild question, a wonder. It is attached to question words.
John-mi? → What about John?
-mi can also be attached to a noun to mean “what about”
Qayu-mi pit? → What are you doing?
Unaqaa asirtuq? Una asirtuq. → Is this one good? This one is good.
Ertii (tamiin) pektaartua. → I work every day
[every-day - (every) - work-I]Nuuwikuutak’gcikina! → Happy New Year!
Where to learn
You could expect from an endangered language spoken by less than a hundred people today that there aren’t many resources online about it.
While you wouldn’t be all wrong, you’d also be surprised by what is available.
A researcher named Jeff Leer created quite a few very well-detailed resources between 1978 and 1990. The one I referred to in the Verbs section was by him too: Classroom Grammar of Koniag Alutiiq Kodiak Island Dialect.
He also wrote this small 162-page Conversational Alutiiq Dictionary which is even more convenient since we can search the PDF to find words!
As for other resources online, a small group of people are trying to preserve the language and making sure it’s as widely available as possible.
The Alutiiq Museum has quite a few pages about all the very basics of the language.
If you want to know everything there is to know about Alutiiq’s pronunciation this free PDF from them goes in-depth into the rules and changes that happen.
The Alutiiqlanguage.org website is the hub for most other things:
A link to a YouTube channel that counts 276 videos of teaching (mostly immersion videos but also a few explanatory ones)
A link to a Quilzet classroom with dozens of flashcard decks
Links to posters and games and stories
A link to a list of postbases
and a lot more!
There’s also an online dictionary, called Wiinaq4, available. While not complete, it's an invaluable tool for such an endangered language.
There are also 200 links to resources about the Alutiiq language, culture, and history here but many of the links directing to the University of Alaska Fairbanks—where most of the available PDFs were saved—are now dead so finding the resources is a bit harder than before I guess.
Final words
What a discovery.
Digging into Alutiiq and its tiny community far from the rest of the world was a magnificent experience. Finding a community actively doing its best to spread its language, recording as much as possible, while creating books for younger generations is inspiring, to say the least.
What more is there to say?
I really don’t know without repeating myself to say how much I loved digging into Alutiiq.
If I weren’t already learning other languages I love, this is definitely one I’d have loved to really learn. The sound of the language and its intricacies fascinated me.
Who knows? Maybe in the future!
Until then, thanks for reading and see you next week for a short discovery of another lesser-known North American Indigenous language. 😆
It appears this name is also supposed to get changed although the new one isn’t set yet.
Fun fact, the name Alaska comes from the Aleut language Alaxsxa.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was a bit sad to know I wouldn’t be able to take this opportunity to learn more about that script as I find it magnificent and fascinating.
Which means “sea lion” apparently!
Fun to read that Jeff Leerʼs work was useful to you for this piece. I study Lingít in southEAST Alaska and benefit from Leerʼs work in this language (particularly with Yukon Native Language Center)