World Language Map

Where is Kalaallisut spoken?

Kalaallisut is an Eskimo-Aleut language, spoken in Greenland and Denmark. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Kalaallisut is spoken

Kalaallisut is spoken in 2 countries: Greenland and Denmark. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Greenland84%48,511
Denmark0.1%7,168

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Kalaallisut is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Kalaallisut.

How many people speak Kalaallisut?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language. The table above has rough per-country estimates from Unicode CLDR.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Kalaallisut sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Kalaallisut as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Eskimo-Aleut
  2. Eskimo
  3. Inuit
  4. Greenlandic Inuit
  5. Kalaallisut

Related languages

Other languages in the Greenlandic Inuit group:

More about Kalaallisut

Codes: ISO 639-3 kal, Glottolog kala1399. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Kalaallisut

Where is Kalaallisut spoken?

Kalaallisut is spoken in Greenland and Denmark. Unicode CLDR puts it at 84% of the population of Greenland, which is about 48,511 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Kalaallisut in?

Glottolog places Kalaallisut in the Eskimo-Aleut family, in the branch Eskimo, Inuit and Greenlandic Inuit.

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