History of written Greenlandic

Not much else was left of the Norse when Hans Egede, a Danish Lutheran pastor, arrived on Greenland in the 1720s. He had hoped to reform the Norse brethren who had reportedly lapsed into paganism, but found only Inuit people and no trace of the Norwegians.Wittman, 1909.

Egede spent fifteen years on Greenland, learning the language and forming a small congregation. Egede also founded Nuuk, the modern capital city of Greenland. At his departure, the work was continued by his son, Poul. The younger Egede published the first Greenlandic dictionary, Dictionarium grönlandico-danico-latinum, in 1750,Hansen Egede, 1750. and a grammar in 1760.Hansen Egede, 1760. A translation of the New TestamentHansen Egede, 1766. followed in 1766.Theil, 2022.

The Lutheran mission were assisted by missionaries from the German Morovian church, who also established their congregations.Wittman, 1909.

The second substantial contribution to written Greenlandic was made by a Greenland-born Morivian, Samuel Petrus Kleinschmidt. He was born on Greenland, the son of a German father and a Danish mother. Kleinschmidt spent his childhood years on Greenland, but was sent to Germany for school at the age of eight. His teenage years abroad remain murky, but he appears again in Zeist, Holland, in 1828, where he likely received linguistic training. His father, Johan Conrad Kleinschmidt had worked on the translation of the New Testament, and Samuel followed in his footsteps. In 1837 he found work as a seminary teacher in Christianfeld, from he were he was sent out as a missionary to his native Greenland in 1841.Rosing & Preston, 1951. His orthography of 1851 became the official spelling of the Greenlandic language until the 1973 reform.Kleinschmidt, 1851.

Kleinschmidt’s orthography used the circumflex accent to indicate long vowels and the letter kra (“ĸ”) to write the [q] sound.Petersen, 1997, p. 198. A capital form of kra is not encoded separately in Unicode.Everson, n.d.

Egede’s and Kleinschmidt’s spellings were based on the central West-Greenlandic dialect, spoken around Nuuk. When the Greenlandic government started work on a new orthography in 1954, not only a simplification of the spelling was desired, but they hoped to also bring the written Greenlandic closer to the other dialects.Olson, 2001.

Modern developments

In 1971, Oqaasiliortut – the Greenlandic Language Council – presented their reform. The new orthography doubled letters to write long vowels and replaced the “ĸ” with “q”.Petersen, 1997, p. 196. The reform was approved in 1973, and a dictionary followed in 1977.Ministeriet for Grønland, 1977. Kleinschmidt’s orthography, however, remained in use for a while after the reform. Most print media didn’t change spelling until the 1980s.Olson, 2001.