Who Actually Lives in Greenland?
In recent weeks, the world’s largest, coldest island has been suddenly thrust into the centre of world affairs. US President Donald Trump’s claim that it is vital strategic territory has some basis, as warming temperatures open new trans-Arctic trade routes. It is so critical that it was, until recently, the site of the only-ever war between NATO members: from 1973 to 2022, the Danish and Canadian navies took turns seizing a desolate rock called Hans Island, leaving behind their flag and a bottle of their finest whisky for the next occupiers to enjoy.
Still, one suspects that the US claim is less in the spirit of geostrategy, and more in that of a Republican congressman who proposed renaming it Red, White, and Blueland. To be fair, this would be only slightly more ridiculous than its current name. The vast polar desert (which is actually three islands covered by an ice sheet) was memorably branded by an enterprising Viking named Erik the Red, who wanted his friends to follow him when he fled Iceland after killing his neighbour in a fight.
Anyway, in all this international furore, no one seems to have asked the opinion of the people who actually live there. Even if they cared to, would they know what language to ask in?
Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. When Erik and his buddies first washed up there in the 10th Century, it is possible that they were the only human beings there. A few bands of Native Americans sporadically showed up to hunt seals, but the ancestors of today’s Inuit probably did not permanently settle till the 14th Century at the earliest. Along with the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius, it is one of a handful of odd examples of white people arriving somewhere before the “natives.”
The Vikings braved violent seas and freezing nights that last for months, but as the earth’s climate grew colder in the late Middle Ages, their settlements dwindled and eventually disappeared. Greenland’s winters are so harsh that even the deepest roots are reached by the frost.
The original Norsemen did leave some linguistic legacy. Greenlandic, the modern Inuit language that is the territory’s official language, uses several Norse loanwords that make little sense to modern Danes. In a way, the Inuits are better stewards of their legacy than their own kin. The only Greenland Norse word that survives elsewhere is skraeling, the eerie name the Vikings applied to the mysterious peoples they glimpsed on dark Arctic journeys. In modern Icelandic, it means something like “barbarian.”
Today, the first American territory Europeans ever colonised is the most Native American place in the world. Inuit Greenlanders make up over 85% of the population, and they pretty much all speak Greenlandic as their first language. Danish is used in business, and in addition to the 12% or so who look like Erik the Red, between 50–80% of the population do also speak it. But younger Greenlanders increasingly favour their mother tongue, which became the sole official language in 2009.
Inuit languages are, in many ways, suited to their environment. They have fifty words for different sorts of snow, but no translation for generic “snow.” Like many isolated communities, they deploy bizarre linguistic features that would make their language next to impossible for outsiders to learn.
Greenlandic’s affinity for long words makes German look like Morse code. Like German, new words can be formed by compounding multiple elements. In Greenlandic, they can incorporate an entire complex sentence. Someone who nervously accepts his reputation for adeptness in forming a consortium of small radio stations could pithily express his feelings with the single word, nalunaarasuartaateeranngualioqatigi-iffissualioriataallaqqissupilorujussuanngortartuinnakasinngortinniamisa-alinnguatsiaraluallaqqooqigaminngamiaasiinngooq.
Greenlanders use their language’s flexibility to maintain its purity in the modern world. For example, many languages’ word for “computer” is simply a garbling of the English. The Japanese say konpyuta, while Hindi has kampyootar. By contrast, Greenlanders use a qaritaujaq, or “electric brain” (interestingly, this is the same formulation as in Mandarin Chinese).
Still today, many Greenlanders living deep in the Arctic wilderness speak only Greenlandic. But entering the modern world generally requires a new language. As with everywhere else on earth, younger people in Nuuk increasingly prefer English as a second language. Even the most liberal-minded visitor may opt to call a port Scoresbysund rather than the native Ittoqortoormiit. And good luck finding modern entertainment, or even accessing the internet, in a language spoken by fifty thousand people on the edge of the earth.
The Inuit were once called Eskimos, which was a slur British settlers unwittingly borrowed from another Native American tribe, suggesting that their northern neighbours ate raw meat. Today, this is considered offensive in Canada, though less so in the United States. Wherever they are, though, the fate of Inuit languages outside Greenland suggests that the future of Greenlandic may be bleak.
In Alaska, much of which is hardly less isolated than Greenland, less than a fifth of Native Americans speak anything other than English. The same is true across most of Canada. In the territory of Nunavut, which was spun off essentially as the world’s vastest reservation to preserve native languages and cultures, about two-thirds of people still do. But for those who do not want to make a living the same way their forebears did ten thousand years ago, jobs in Ontario are not offered in Inuktitut.
Greenland is remote enough, and its native community compact and coherent enough, that Greenlandic will probably survive well into the next century. But not that long ago, one might have said the same of Hawaiian. Hands-off rule by one of Europe’s smallest and chillest nations is one thing. But for people from every conceivable background on earth, American culture has some kind of gravitational allure that proves impossible to resist. If Mr. Trump has his way, Greenlandic may end up following countless other languages, spoken by natives and immigrants alike, over the event horizon.
Harsh isolation can preserve and create linguistic anomalies. Icelandic has strayed shockingly little from Old Norse, to the point that people today can more or less understand sagas from over a thousand years ago (for comparison, check out Beowulf in the original). As winter ice thawed in Antarctica this past spring, linguists were amused to discover that snowed-in researchers on one base had already begun to develop their own dialect of English.
Even if the world’s largest island does become America’s next frontier, it will remain a unique place. A changing climate and modern technology can do a lot, but they cannot pull a place where the ice has not melted in 2.6 million years fully into the centrifuge of cultural and linguistic assimilation. And even if the capital town of Nuuk becomes Port Trump, we should at least hope that the island keeps its charmingly nonsensical name.
