Hi! I was wondering how many languages(officially) are spoken in Greenland!
Strictly speaking, and officially, the answer is one, according to the Greenland Home Rule Law of 2009:
20. Kalaallit oqaasii tassaapput Kalaallit Nunaanni pisortatigoortumik oqaatsit.
"20. The Greenlandic language is the official language in Greenland."
In practice, the situation is more nuanced. The Greenlandic government has published a report "Det grønlandske sprog i dag" (Danish) which describes the evolving knowledge and use of Greenlandic and Danish in Greenland.
While the vast majority of Greenlanders do speak Greenlandic, there are still a lot of people who cannot do so fluently and this has a big effect on its use in official situations. For example the report mentions that:
"Selv om arbejdspladserne ansætter flere og flere grønlandsksprogede medarbejdere, er det stadig almindeligt at alt foregår på dansk, fordi nogle ansatte ikke taler grønlandsk."
[Even if workplaces are hiring more and more Greenlandic-speaking workers, it is still common that everything takes place in Danish, because some employees do not speak Greenlandic.]
It also mentions that:
"Administrationen er grundlagt på det danske sprog. På offentlige arbejdspladser foregår alt efter dansk forvaltningstradition fordi det er mest effektivt, og fordi man er vant til den arbejdsform
[The administration is based on the Danish language. In public workplaces everything takes place according to the Danish management tradition because that is the most effective, and because people are used to that way of working.]
So in practice Danish has a (semi-)official role in Greenland without being a true official language. NB I'm not touching here on the separate use of Tunumiisut (East Greenlandic) or Inuktun ("North" Greenlandic), but I've summarised the various dialects before as follows:
Greenlandic (as in, the native language of people in Greenland) is actually three different dialects (which, in turn, are considered all to be dialects of a wider Inuit language continuum stretching all the way to Alaska):
- West Greenlandic or Kalaallisut ([speaking] like a kalaaleq [West Greenlander, from Norse ‘skræling’])- the dialect spoken on the west coast (apart from the northernmost district)
- East Greenlandic or Tunumiisut ([speaking] like an inhabitant of the back side [of Greenland]) - the dialect spoken in East Greenland, in the Ammassalik and Ittoqqoortoormiit districts. The East Greenlanders made their way there over the north of the island at an earlier period in history, and their dialect is the most ‘evolved’ of the Inuit dialects.
- North Greenlandic or Inuktun ([speaking] like a person) - the dialect spoken in the far north west, in Qaanaaq and surrounding areas. Inuktun speakers were the last to arrive in Greenland, in recent history, and their dialect is more ‘conservative’, like those spoken over the water in Canada.
