Kalaallisut is a West Greenlandic Inuit language and the official language of Greenland, belonging to the Eskimo-Aleut family — one of the few language families with no demonstrated relation to any other family on earth. It is a polysynthetic language, meaning entire sentences can be expressed in a single word by chaining suffixes onto a root. A word like 'isikkoortitsisariarsorpaa' ('he tried to have it fixed') is grammatically a single unit. Kalaallisut was first written down by Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede in the 18th century; the current orthography was standardised in 1973. Despite the remoteness and small population (~56,000), Greenlandic has a robust literary tradition and is the primary language of government and education.
