Background

Language Family: Eskimo-Aleut / Eskimo / Inuit

Kalaallisut is the autonym of the Greenlandic language; it is also used specifically to refer to the West Greenlandic dialect of the language. Therefore, where dialects diverge, I intend to follow the phonology of West Greenlandic.
Kalaallisut is spoken in Greenland, but also in Denmark.

Phonology

Consonants

Rischel (1974) describes /ɴ/ as being of a “marginal status” (p. 22).
Rischel (1974) posits /h/ as appearing in some interjections, but not normally being contrastive (p. 23).
/l/ is sometimes rendered as [ʟ] (Rischel 1974, 246).
[ts] is the only non-geminate consonant cluster to be attested in modern Greenlandic (Collis 1990, 311).
/ʃ/ is attested in some dialects, but because of its limited usage and lack of orthographic attestation (Collis 1990, 301), I have opted to omit it.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular
Stops	p	t		k	q
Fricatives	v	s		ɣ	ʁ
Nasals	m	n		ŋ	ɴ
Approximants		l	j

Vowels

Vowel length is contrastive (Collis 1990, 301). Long vowels are indicated by duplicate graphemes.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Low		a

Alphabet

Geminated consonants are written with double letters (Collis 1990, 301).
- Geminated /ŋ/ is written ⟨nng⟩ (Collis 1990, 317).
⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩ were used more widely in earlier orthographies, but in the modern orthography they only survive in pre-uvular contexts (Collis 1990, 301).

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
e	/i/	only appears before uvulars
g	/ɣ/
i	/i/
j	/j/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/u/	only appears before uvulars
p	/p/
q	/q/
r	/ʁ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
v	/v/	⟨f⟩ is also sometimes used
Digraph
ng	/ŋ/
rn	/ɴ/

Lenition Rules

Stem-final uvulars delete when followed by /ɣ/ or /ʁ/ (Rischel 1974, 36).
Long consonants shorten after long vowels, especially for speakers in southern dialect areas (Rischel 1974, 59).
Intervocalic /q/ is often closed incompletely, leading to some degree of spirantization (Rischel 1974, 131).

Misc. Rules

In the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/, the second vowel assimilates to yield [aa]; however, /ai/ is preserved word-finally (Rischel 1974, 32).
In consonant clusters, the first fully assimilates to the second, yielding a geminate (Rischel 1974, 35).
Vowels pharyngealize before uvular consonants (Rischel 1974, 38).
/ŋ/ nasalizes preceding vowels, sometimes at the expense of its own realization; this process is more advanced in East Greenlandic than in other dialects (Rischel 1974, 132).
In some dialects, /ɣ/ is replaced entirely by /ŋ/; geminates of /ɣ/ tend to collapse instead to [kk] [Rischel (1974), p. 167].
Suffix-initial consonants alternate between stops and fricatives; they are stops when preceded by a consonant, fricatives when preceded by a vowel (Rischel 1974, 242).
Intervocalic, stem-internal single fricatives tend to despirantize when they become geminates (Rischel 1974, 242).
For the aforementioned stop/fricative alternations, the fricative seems to be the underlying form (Rischel 1974, 249).
/t/ becomes an affricate when followed by /i/ (Collis 1990, 300).

References

Collis, Dirmid R. F., ed. 1990. Arctic Languages: An Awakening. United Nations Educational, Scientific; Cultural Organization.

Rischel, Jørgen. 1974. Topics in West Greenlandic phonology: Regularities Underlying the Phonetic Appearance of Wordforms in a Polysynthetic Language. Akademisk Forlag.

Kalaallisut

Bill Mizgerd