West Greenlandic Pidgin
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
West Greenlandic Pidgin | |
---|---|
Native to | Greenland |
Era | 17th–19th century |
Greenlandic-based pidgin | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | None (mis ) |
Glottolog | west2864 |
IETF | crp-GL |
West Greenlandic Pidgin is an extinct Greenlandic-based contact language once used between the Inuit of Greenland and European traders. The vocabulary is mostly Greenlandic. Although words from Germanic languages were incorporated over the course of contact with Europeans, most of the words that are not Inuit came from other local trade languages. West Greenlandic Pidgin has a vastly simplified grammar, and sounds that were unfamiliar to Northern Europeans, such as r and q, were lost. For example, orsoq 'blubber' became oksok 'bacon'. However, other sounds have since been lost from Greenlandic, such as sh (merged into s in modern Greenlandic) and consonant clusters: nigsik has become nieksik 'hook', but in modern Greenlandic is nissik.
References
- Marianne Mithun (2001) The Languages of Native North America, p 593ff
- Hein van der Voort, "Eskimo pidgin", in Arends, Muysken, & Smith (eds), 1995, Pidgins and Creoles: an introduction
Categories:
- Articles with short description
- Short description is different from Wikidata
- Language articles with IETF language tag
- Language articles with unreferenced extinction date
- Articles containing Greenlandic-language text
- Articles containing Creoles and pidgins-language text
- Extinct languages of Greenland
- North America Native-based pidgins and creoles
- Languages extinct in the 19th century
- All stub articles
- Pidgin and creole language stubs