From CKY to Greenlandic, part one on "getting to know Indigenous American languages", publ. on the: 21/08/2026

I have had a love for Indigenous American languages for a long time. Some people are just mainly drawn to the cultures and places they are most familiar with in life. Many in the UK, are I feel drawn to Asia, not only because one can stay in Thailand for example, cheaply by UK standards, but also I feel there is a "general thing" in peoples' consciousness right now, where southeast Asia especially does draw people - including on a spiritual level, being a region of temples and Buddhism for example, although foreigners likely only rarely look at the more indigenous beliefs. I also haven't ever met a single UK person who learned one of the languages spoken there, but for me personally, I am more drawn to the Americas than to southeast Asia, and to the land, cultures and spirituality, and languages, there.

From my experience, people in the UK know far less about the Americas than about southeast Asia. On that level, like Siberia, the Americas in general always invoke in me a feeling of magic and hidden wisdom. I would say that probably most of the American films we see in the UK, do not focus on the indigenous people, nor indigenous aspects to the landscapes. Nevertheless, these things underlie everything in any American film that allows one to see anything of landscapes or culture. Even in an American TV series like say, CKY, Native Americans might not be the focus, but we are constantly seeing bits of the landscapes and nature around West Chester, Pennsylvania. 

For me personally, when I feel the slightest love for a place, even when seen through TV and being able to "feel" something of its vibe in my consciousness - I wish to know how to call it, how to relate to it. I ask, "what did the indigenous people of that place call a 'river'? What is its true name? What about that mountain there, what did they call that? It feels mysterious, what is in its ancient name?"

This is really what got me interested in Native American languages; but it was also being able to glimpse and to feel something of their immense wisdom, initially through certain films, books etc. I felt that their languages must also be wise to reflect them, that their languages must possess an understanding of their lands, so vast, ancient, complex, different, from anything in Europe. And I am not wrong.

Like many perhaps, my initial interest went kind of towards Algonquian languages. They are widely spoken, well, some of them are. The Mohican language for example, an Algonquian language, is spoken in the film Last of the Mohicans, a film that carries with it a powerful emotional truth, and within it, one gets to feel the energy of those vast northern forests, to hear the language, and to understand the kind of wisdom and love that those Mohicans shared with that landscape. 

And so at first, it was languages like Cree and Ojibwe that I became aware of. These languages are known for possessing extremely long words, and for being highly polysynthetic, as are the Eskimo-Aleut languages in the Arctic Americas, in many places spoken directly north of where Algonquian languages are spoken.

But I never learned an Algonquian language beyond a few phrases, words and pronouns. I honestly find them exceedingly difficult, exceedingly. Cheyenne for example, a language with words that can be, well, enormously long, and which contain "voiceless vowels", so when learning this language with the help of an audio CD, I was reading the words in the book, and seeing how their spoken realisation almost "floated over" certain vowels, making it very hard, for a person who speaks English as their first language, to understand how such consonants, and vowels, and voiceless vowels, could be made sense of in my mind as one word, with its complex inherent meanings. Cheyenne is I think perhaps particularly difficult in this sense.

Many "western" films and books do of course, by their very nature, give us vast views into a more western landscape, one of arid canyons, pine forests atop mountains, and deserts, dotted with sky-islands or mesa-type mountains. These areas are found in many parts of the Americas, but we often associate them with the southwest of what is now the USA. 

Many indigenous peoples have lived here, with the Pueblo Peoples, like the Hopi in Zuni, in many cases being the most ancient to have inhabited these landscapes. In western films, we perhaps more often hear languages like one of the Apache languages though, and the related Navajo language was another of those first Native American languages, which I tried to study. And in the case of Navajo, I was more successful. 

I cannot speak Navajo, but there have been times when I have been known, and been able to read or understand many parts, in certain specific contexts. Even though Navajo is also very difficult, being polysynthetic, tonal, and having a vastly complex and diverse verbal system, my process of learning it was nevertheless easier, and felt in a sense more connected, for me personally. 

Another of these first Native American languages I got learning, was Greenlandic. With learning Greenlandic, I was more successful than with any of the other Indigenous American languages that lie north of the equator. Greenlandic is, difficult. But it also felt more profoundly connected to my, European world - not simply because of Greenlandic having close ties to Denmark and to the Norse, but for the greater reason of how the Norse interacted with Greenlanders in the past, and how actually the same also happened in the other direction. 

I once spoke to a Greenlander for example, who had distant ancestral relatives who had been buried in Scotland. They had been whalers, whaling close to the Hebrides, and had tragically drowned. This is part of what may be a more "long-term" interaction, with people coming to Britain from the west. I have discussed other aspects of this elsewhere in a great deal of detail - but one theory about later sightings of "Finfolk, and two examples of their canoes, are connected by many to Greenland, and to indigenous canoes used by the Kalaallit, Greenlanders. I do not personally think that these Fin-folk were Greenlanders in such a strict sense, but rather that this "Finfolk" could have also been linked to Greenland, for example, just as certain legends imply that they were in Iceland too.

I also went to Iceland, and Iceland is not that far from Greenland; and again, there were some influences from Greenland into Iceland. Perhaps at some point I should search for Eskimo-Aleut cognates for some of the more obscure words in Goidelic and in Nordic languages.

I hope that this was interesting and will quite soon publish part two. This post is dedicated to all Native Americas.