861: Classifications of Yupik, Inuit, and Aleut Apr 17, 2017

Politically correct movements do not really have the power to change a language in any major way, but often individual words will be dropped for others that are felt to be less offensive. This is, according to Ben O'Neill's antidiscrimination-paradigm, useless in the long-run, but some words deemed more accurate, scientific, or simply less offensive have already replaced various dysphemisms. People tend to use the word 'Inuit' now instead of 'Eskimo', but the problem here is that this term is not completely accurate. There are many groups of people with far more subdivisions than this, but in the arctic there are the Inuit, the Yupik, and the Aleut, with distinct languages and cultures. Those in Canada, and Greenland are all Inuit, though of course this can be split up into groups including Kalaallisut, Inuktitut, and Inuvialuk. There are also those on the Aleutian Islands who speak Aleut, as well as those in Alaska and Russian who speak Yupik languages, neither of which are Inuit peoples. In fact, the broader language family is called Eskimo-Aleut, descended from Proto-Eskimo. While 'Eskimo' may not be what any group calls itself, the most inclusive word to use when talking about these arctic peoples would be 'Eskimo' as it does not exclude those in Alaska and Russia.