Aleut language

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Aleut (Unangam Tunuu)

Spoken in

Aleutian Islands
speaker > 150 (as of 2007)
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

ale

ISO 639-3

ale

Aleut (native: Unangam Tunuu ) is an Eskimo- Aleut language spoken by the Unangan in the Aleutian Islands , Pribilof Islands, and the Commander Islands . In 2007 there were fewer than 150 remaining Aleut speakers. It is therefore considered a highly endangered language .

Aleut has two dialect groups, East Aleut and Atka. Within East Aleut a distinction is made between the dialects of Unalaska , Belkowski , Akutan , the Pribilof Islands, Kaschega and Nikolski . Within the Atka dialect group there are the dialects of Attu (extinct since the 1940s), Bering Island, and Medny Island .

Aleut was first described by Vitus Bering's expedition in 1741; the language was first lexicographically recorded in 1778 in a word list compiled by James King on Cook's 1778 journey. It was around this time that the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg became aware of the language after hearing about the Russian trade expeditions. In response to Catherine the Great's efforts to publish a dictionary of all the languages ​​of the Russian Empire, Peter Simon Pallas was hired to conduct the field work necessary to collect linguistic information about Aleut. Between 1791 and 1792, Carl Heinrich Merck and Michael Rohbeck compiled word lists and counted the male population and their aleutic ancestral names. Juri Fjodorowitsch Lisjanski , like Nikolai Petrovich Resanov, created further word lists. Johann Christoph Adelung and Johann Severin Vater mentioned the language for the first time in 1806 in their “General Linguistics”.

It was not until 1819 that the first professional linguist, the Dane Rasmus Rask , studied Aleut. He collected words and diffraction patterns from two speakers of the East Aleut dialect who lived in Saint Petersburg. In 1824 Innokenti Weniaminov began to study Aleut in Unalaska and revolutionized it as a literary language: he created an orthography using the Cyrillic alphabet (the Latin alphabet would come later), translated the Gospel of Matthew and a few other religious texts into Aleut and published an East Aleut grammar in 1846. The religious scriptures were translated with the help of two friends of Weniaminov, the Aleut native speakers Ivan Pankow (leader of Tigalda) and Iakow Nezwetow (priest of Atka). Nezvetov also wrote an Atka-Aleut dictionary. After Weniaminov's work was published, some pious people became interested in studying and recording Aleut, which helped the missionary work of Russian Orthodox clerics.

The first French to describe the Aleut language was Alphonse Pinart in 1871, shortly after the United States acquired Alaska . A few years later, in 1878, the American Lucien M. Turner began collecting aleutic words for a word list. The Pole Benedikt Dibowski began in 1881, the Russian doctor Nikolai Wassiljewitsch in 1892 to create word lists from the dialects of the commanders' islands in 1881.

From 1909 to 1910, the ethnologist Waldemar Jochelson traveled to the Aleut communities of Unalaska , Atka , Attu and Nikolski and did nineteen months of fieldwork there. Alexei Yachmenew and Leonti Sivstov , both of whom spoke the Unalaskan-Aleut language, assisted Jochelson in his ethnographic work. Jochelson compiled Aleut stories, folklore pieces, and myths and had not only written down many of them, but also recorded them on tape. There he discovered numerous expressions and grammatical peculiarities and contributed a lot to the scientific knowledge of the Aleut language.

In the 1930s, two native Aleutians wrote works that are considered breakthroughs in the use of Aleut as a literary language. Afinogen K. Ermeloff wrote a description of a shipwreck in his native language and Ardelion G. Ermeloff kept a diary in Aleut. At the same time, linguist Melville Jacobs obtained some new texts from Sergey Golley, a spokesman for Atka-Aleut, who was in the hospital at the time.

John P. Harrington promoted research on the Pribilof Island dialect on Saint Paul Island in 1941 and also collected new vocabulary. In 1944, the United States Department of the Interior published "The Aleut Language" as part of the war effort, allowing its soldiers to understand the Aleut language. This English-Aleut language project was based on the work of Wenjaminov. In 1994 Knut Bergsland published a complete dictionary of Aleut.

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Aleut is mostly written in a Latin alphabet, in Pribilof also with Cyrillic letters .

literature

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