The First European Dictionary of an Inuit Language Was Compiled by a Lutheran Pastor Who Had Sailed to Find Vikings

Hans Egede had sailed from Bergen in May 1721 with his wife Gertrud, their four children, and approximately forty Norwegian settlers, expecting to find the lost Norse community of medieval Greenland that he had read about in the surviving Icelandic chronicles. The community had ceased recorded contact with Iceland and Norway in approximately the 1450s; Egede was carrying a Lutheran missionary commission from the Danish-Norwegian Crown to reconvert the long-isolated Norse Christians to the post-Reformation Protestant faith.

He found no Norse. He found Inuit. The surviving Norse Eastern Settlement farms were empty ruins. The standing Greenland population was Thule Inuit, who had progressively occupied the west and southwest Greenland coast through the 14th and 15th centuries.

Egede stayed anyway. He spent the next fifteen years among the Greenland Inuit — first at Håbets Ø (‘Hope Island’, near modern Nuuk), then at the new permanent settlement of Godthåb (modern Nuuk) — and produced the first European dictionary of an Inuit language.

Learning Kalaallisut

The Greenland Inuit language — Kalaallisut, the western Greenlandic dialect of the broader Inuit-Yupik-Aleut family — was almost completely unknown to the European linguistic tradition in 1721. A small number of Dutch whalers had been operating off the Greenland coast for approximately a century and had accumulated a handful of practical commercial-trade phrases, but no comprehensive linguistic survey had been undertaken. The Inuit population had no written language; the Europeans had no Kalaallisut grammar.

Egede built his linguistic understanding through approximately five years of immersive language-learning with the local Inuit communities. He worked with two specific informants — the young Inuit men Pooq and Qiperoq — who served as his primary language teachers, religious-translation collaborators, and (later) representatives of the Greenland Inuit community on a diplomatic visit to Copenhagen in 1724. The visit was a substantial early-modern European public sensation; Pooq and Qiperoq were received at the Danish royal court, were painted by court artists, and were the principal Copenhagen attraction of summer 1724.

Pooq returned to Greenland after the visit. Qiperoq died in Copenhagen in 1725 of smallpox.

The dictionary

Egede returned to Denmark in 1736 (his wife Gertrud had died in Greenland the previous year, and his health was failing) and spent the remainder of his life at Stubbekøbing on the Danish island of Falster compiling his Greenland materials for publication. His most influential single work — Det gamle Grønlands nye Perlustration (‘A New Survey of Old Greenland’), 1741 — gave the European reading public the first comprehensive account of the Greenland Inuit and the lost Norse settlement.

The linguistic work was carried forward by his son Paul Egede, who had spent his teenage years in Greenland and was substantially more fluent in Kalaallisut than his father. Paul published the Dictionarium Grönlandico-Danico-Latinum (a Kalaallisut–Danish–Latin trilingual dictionary) at Copenhagen in 1750 and a separate Kalaallisut grammar in 1760. The Paul Egede dictionary contained approximately 4,000 substantial Kalaallisut lexical items with full Danish and Latin glosses; the grammar systematically described the polysynthetic morphological structure of the language for the first time in any European linguistic publication.

The Egede dictionary and grammar defined the European study of Inuit languages for the following century and a half. Every subsequent 18th- and 19th-century European-language Kalaallisut publication derived from the Egede framework. The modern standardised Kalaallisut writing system — adopted as the official orthography of modern Greenland in 1973 — descends directly from the Paul Egede 1750 orthographic conventions.

Hans Egede died at Falster in November 1758, aged 72. Paul died at Copenhagen in 1789, aged 80.