Abstract
This article provides an overview of some key properties of Eskimo-Aleut languages. It discusses the geographic range and number of speakers of these languages, some of which are seriously endangered. It also provides examples and discussion of the polysynthetic nature of some of these languages, where a single word can have the interpretation of a sentence. An intriguing property of the Aleut language is its anaphoric agreement, which provides challenges for syntactic analyses. Within Eskimo-Aleut, we find languages that seem to lack tense, while closely related members have a finely graded tense system.
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