West Greenlandic Pidgin is an extinct Greenlandic-based contact language once used between the

Inuit Inuit (; iu, ᐃᓄᐃᑦ 'the people', singular: Inuk, , dual: Inuuk, ) are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territorie ...

Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland ...

and European traders. The vocabulary is mostly Greenlandic. Although words from

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...

were incorporated over the course of contact with Europeans, most of the words that are not Inuit came from other local

trade languages A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

. 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 Marianne Mithun (born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 19 ...

(2001) ''The Languages of Native North America'', p 593''ff'' *Hein van der Voort, "Eskimo pidgin", in Arends, Muysken, & Smith (eds), 1995, ''Pidgins and Creoles: an introduction'' Extinct languages of Greenland North America Native-based pidgins and creoles Languages extinct in the 19th century {{ling-stub