Editing Inuit languages (section)

== Morphology and syntax ==
{{For|a more detailed description specific to Nunavut Inuktitut|Inuit grammar}}

The Inuit languages, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, have very rich morphological systems in which a succession of different [[morpheme]]s are added to root words (like verb endings in European languages) to indicate things that, in languages like English, would require several words to express. (See also: [[Agglutinative language]] and [[Polysynthetic language]]) All Inuit words begin with a root morpheme to which other morphemes are suffixed. The language has hundreds of distinct suffixes, in some dialects as many as 700. Fortunately for learners, the language has a highly regular morphology. Although the rules are sometimes very complicated, they do not have exceptions in the sense that English and other [[Indo-European languages]] do.

This system makes words very long, and potentially unique. For example, in central [[Nunavut]] [[Inuktitut]]:

{{interlinear |lang=iu |indent=2
|top= {{lang|iu|Tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga.}}
|tusaa- -tsiaq- -junnaq- -nngit- -tualuu- -junga
|{to hear} well {be able to} not {very much} 1SG.PRES.IND.{{gcl|NSP|non-specific}}
|I cannot hear very well.{{citation needed|date=March 2024}}
}}

This sort of word construction is pervasive in the Inuit languages and makes them very unlike English. In one large Canadian corpus{{snd}}the ''Nunavut [[Hansard]]''{{snd}}92% of all words appear only once, in contrast to a small percentage in most English corpora of similar size. This makes the application of [[Zipf's law]] quite difficult in the Inuit language. Furthermore, the notion of a [[part of speech]] can be somewhat complicated in the Inuit languages. Fully inflected verbs can be interpreted as nouns. The word ilisaijuq can be interpreted as a fully inflected verb: "he studies", but can also be interpreted as a noun: "student". That said, the meaning is probably obvious to a fluent speaker, when put in context.

The morphology and syntax of the Inuit languages vary to some degree between dialects, and the article ''[[Inuit grammar]]'' describes primarily central Nunavut dialects, but the basic principles will generally apply to all of them and to some degree to [[Yupik languages]] as well.