1. Eskimo–Aleut is a language family native to Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut,
Greenland, and the Chukchi Peninsula on the eastern tip of Siberia. It is also known as Eskaleut,
Eskaleutian, Eskaleutic, Eskimish, Eskimoan, and Macro-Eskimo[1] or Inuit–Unangan.
The Eskimo–Aleut language family is divided into two branches, the Eskimo languages and the Aleut
language.
The Aleut language family consists of a single language, Aleut, spoken in the Aleutian Islands and the
Pribilof Islands. Aleut is divided into several dialects.
The Eskimo languages are divided into two branches, the Yupik languages, spoken in western and
southwestern Alaska and in easternmost Siberia, and the Inuit language, spoken in northern Alaska, in
Canada, and in Greenland. The Inuit language, which covers a huge range of territory, is divided into
several dialects.
The proper place of one language, Sirenik, within the Eskimo family has not been settled. Some linguists
list it as a branch of Yupik, others as a separate branch of the Eskimo family, alongside Yupik and Inuit.
It is thought that the common ancestral language of the Eskimo languages and of Aleut divided into the
Eskimo and Aleut branches around 2000 BCE. The Eskimo language family divided into the Yupik and
Inuit branches around 1000 CE.
The Eskimo–Aleut languages are among the native languages of the Americas. This is a geographical
category, not a linguistic one. The Eskimo–Aleut languages are not demonstrably related to the other
language families of North America and are believed to represent a separate, and the last, prehistoric
migration of peoples from Asia.
Eskimo–Aleut does not have any genetic relationship to any of the world's other language families that
is generally accepted by linguists at the present time. There is general agreement that it is not closely
related to the other language families of North America. The more credible proposals on the external
relations of Eskimo–Aleut all concern one or more of the language families of northern Eurasia, such as
Chukchi–Kamchatkan just across the Bering Strait. One of the first such proposals was made by the
pioneering Danish linguist Rasmus Rask in 1818, upon noticing similarities between Greenlandic Eskimo
and Finnish. Perhaps the most fully developed such proposal to date is Michael Fortescue's Uralo-
Siberian hypothesis, published in 1998. More recently Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) suggested
grouping Eskimo–Aleut with all of the language families of northern Eurasia, with the exception of
Yeniseian, in a proposed language family called Eurasiatic. Such proposals are not generally accepted.
In the 1960s Swadesh suggested a connection with the Wakashan languages. This was picked up and
expanded by Holst (2005).