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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Proto-Inuit | |
|---|---|
| Reconstruction of | Inuit languages |
| Era | ca. 1000 CE |
Reconstructed ancestors | |
Proto-Inuit is the reconstructed proto-language of the Inuit languages, probably spoken about 1000 years ago by the Neo-Eskimo Thule people.[1] It evolved from Proto-Eskimo, from which the Yupik languages also evolved.[2]
Doug Hitch proposes the following chart of consonant phonemes:[3]
| Labial | Apical | Lateral | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voiceless | p | t | ɬ | c | k | q |
| Voiced | v | ʐ | l | j | ɣ | ʁ |
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ |
 | This article about historical linguistics is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. |
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Proto-Inuit is the reconstructed proto-language of the Inuit languages, probably spoken about 1000 years ago by the Neo-Eskimo Thule people. It evolved from Proto-Eskimo, from which the Yupik languages also evolved.
The Inuit languages are a closely related group of indigenous North American languages traditionally spoken across the North American Arctic and the adjacent subarctic regions as far south as Labrador. The Inuit languages are one of the two branches of the Eskaleut (Eskimoan) language family, the other being the Yupik languages, which are spoken in Alaska and the Russian Far East. Most Inuit live in one of three countries: Greenland, a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark; Canada, specifically in Nunavut, the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the Northwest Territories, the Nunavik region of Quebec, and the Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut regions of Labrador; and the United States, specifically in northern and western Alaska. The total population of Inuit speaking their traditional languages is difficult to assess with precision, since most counts rely on self-reported census data that may not accurately reflect usage or competence. Greenland census estimates place the number of Inuit language speakers there at roughly 50,000. According to the 2021 Canadian census, the Inuit population of Canada is 70,540, of which 33,790 report Inuktut (collective name for Inuit languages in Canada) as their first language. Greenland and Canada account for the bulk of Inuit speakers, although about 7,500 Alaskans speak some variety of an Inuit language out of a total population of over 13,000 Inuit. An estimated 7,000 Greenlandic Inuit live in Denmark, the largest group outside of North America. Thus, the total population of Inuit speakers is about 100,000 people. Although they are from two different language families, Inuit also speak both Inuit Sign Language (IUR) in Canada and Greenlandic Sign Language, a dialect of Danish Sign Language, in Greenland. It is unknown to academia if the two sign languages are related. It also remains unknown to what extent IUR is spoken across Inuit Nunangat. Finally, even though IUR is slowly being replaced by American Sign Language, there are efforts to support the native sign language underway.
Inuit Sign Language (IUR; Inuktitut: ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᐆᒃᑐᕋᐅᓯᖏᑦ, romanized: Inuit Uukturausingit) is one of the Inuit languages and the indigenous sign language of Inuit. It is a language isolate native to Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic. It is currently only attested within certain communities in Nunavut, particularly Baker Lake and Rankin Inlet. Although there is a possibility that it may be used in other places where Inuit live in the Arctic, this has not been confirmed. Of the estimated 155 deaf residents of Nunavut in 2000, around 47 were thought to use IUR, while the rest use American Sign Language (ASL) due to schooling. It is unknown how many hearing people use the language nor how many people are monolingual. As it is a highly endangered and relatively hidden language, it has no protection under the federal or territorial governments of Canada. However, IUR exists alongside ASL interpretation within the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut as of 2008. Recently, there has been increased interest in the documentation of the language which would be done through the Nunavut Council for People with Disabilities and the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC). As well, there is a push to expand the interpretation/translation programme through Arctic College to include IUR.
Greenlandic, also known by its endonym Kalaallisut (kalaallisut, [kalaːɬːisʉt]), is an Inuit language belonging to the Eskimoan branch of the Eskaleut language family. It is primarily spoken by the Greenlandic people native to Greenland, with about 57,000 native speakers as of 2025, making it the largest Eskaleut language by number of speakers. Written in the Latin script, it is the sole official language of Greenland, and a recognized minority language in Denmark. In June 2009, the government of Greenland, the Naalakkersuisut, made Greenlandic the sole official language of the autonomous territory, to strengthen it in the face of competition from the colonial language, Danish. Greenlandic is closely related to Canadian Inuit languages such as Inuktitut. The main variety is Kalaallisut, or West Greenlandic. The second variety is Tunumiit oraasiat, or East Greenlandic. The language of the Inughuit (Thule Inuit) of Greenland, Inuktun or Polar Inuit, is a recent arrival and a dialect of Inuktitut. Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language that allows the creation of long words by stringing together roots and suffixes. The language's morphosyntactic alignment is ergative, treating both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb in one way, but the subject of a transitive verb in another. For example, "he plays the guitar" would be in the ergative case as a transitive agent, whereas "I bought a guitar" and "as the guitar plays" (the latter being the intransitive sense of the same verb "to play") would both be in the absolutive case. Nouns are inflected by one of eight cases and for possession. Verbs are inflected for one of eight moods and for the number and person of its subject and object. Both nouns and verbs have complex derivational morphology. The basic word order in transitive clauses is subject–object–verb. The subordination of clauses uses special subordinate moods. A so-called fourth-person category enables switch-reference between main clauses and subordinate clauses with different subjects. Greenlandic is notable for its lack of grammatical tense; temporal relations are expressed normally by context but also by the use of temporal particles such as "yesterday" or "now" or sometimes by the use of derivational suffixes or the combination of affixes with aspectual meanings with the semantic lexical aspect of different verbs. However, some linguists have suggested that Greenlandic always marks future tense. Another question is whether the language has noun incorporation or whether the processes that create complex predicates that include nominal roots are derivational in nature. When adopting new concepts or technologies, Greenlandic usually constructs new words made from Greenlandic roots, but modern Greenlandic has also taken many loans from Danish and English. The language has been written in Latin script since Danish colonization began in the 1700s. Greenlandic's first orthography was developed by Samuel Kleinschmidt in 1851, but within 100 years, it already differed substantially from the spoken language because of a number of sound changes. An extensive orthographic reform was undertaken in 1973 and made the script much easier to learn. This resulted in a boost in Greenlandic literacy, which is now among the highest in the world.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Mae Jemison, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.
