Zahlen, bitte! Counting up to 12 in Greenlandic
While some presidents believe that Greenland is just a large piece of ice, a closer look reveals it to be culturally diverse, including its own numbers.
(Image: heise medien)
Greenland is not a piece of ice, as a US president claimed in early 2025, but a large island where Greenlandic is spoken in four variants. In fact, Kalaallisut, West Greenlandic, is the most widespread language among the Eskimo-Aleut languages. It is spoken by about 57,000 people and has been the official language of the island since 2009.
When it comes to numbers, the language has a peculiarity: from 1 to 12, counting is done in Greenlandic, after that it continues in Danish. Thus, the vigesimal system (with base 20) is not immediately apparent, where "Inuk Naallugu" (= complete human) stands for the number 20. The counting becomes more complicated, as Danish also has a vigesimal system, but except for 20, 40, and 100.
Greenlandic was promoted
Unlike in areas such as Northern Canada and Alaska, speaking Greenlandic was never forbidden. Quite the opposite, Danish and German missionaries strove to convince the population of their faith in Greenlandic.
(Image:Â NASA)
It was Samuel Kleinschmidt, a missionary of the Moravian Church, who authored the first orthography and grammar of Greenlandic, translated the Bible, and recorded the systematic structure of Greenlandic numbers. With the connection to Denmark, the original system became mixed, so that counting up to 12 is done in Greenlandic, and above that in Danish.
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This, in turn, led to the introduction of the Kaktovik numeral system in Greenlandic, developed in 1994, which was intended to facilitate calculations in neighboring Northern Canada and was generally accepted by the Inuit Circumpolar Council in 1998. This system also fell somewhat into oblivion until it was included in Unicode in 2022. As an article in Scientific American shows, it allows for quite elegant calculations. Of course, there are also corresponding apps, for example for Android or for iOS.
| Number | Greenlandic |
| 1 | ataaseq |
| 2 | marluk |
| 3 | pingasut |
| 4 | sisamat |
| 5 | tallimat |
| 6 | arfinillit |
| 7 | arfineq-marluk |
| 8 | arfineq-pingasut |
| 9 | qulingiluat (or qulaaluat or arfineq-sisamat) |
| 10 | qulit |
| 11 | aqqanillit |
| 12 | aqqaneq-marluk |
| Source: | Counting in Greenlandic |
Longest word as a sentence construct
Back to Greenland: In Greenlandic, there are not only tricky numbers but also tricky words, because the language is polysynthetic and very long words are possible. The longest word is considered to be "Nalunaarasuartaatee-ranngualioqatigiiffissua-lioriataallaqqissupiloru-jussuanngortartuinnaka-sinngortinniamisaalinn-guatsiaraluallaqqqooqiga-minngamiaasiinngooq", which describes a rather nonsensical sentence about the initiator of a radio. The word is said to have 153 or 156 letters, depending on whether small or tiny radio transmitters are being referred to.
(Image:Â Michael Haferkamp, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Let's limit ourselves to Qarasaasiaq, which literally translates to "artificial brain". This makes the Greenlandic word for computer markedly different from the Icelandic Tölva, which literally means "number fortune-teller" and refers to the Germanic origin of this language – just in case you keep confusing Greenland and Iceland, as a US president did.
But the current resident of the White House also seems to believe that penguins from the South Pole spread wherever there is a lot of ice.
(dahe)
