Greenland: language inequalities in external and internal dynamics of marginalisation

The shift from colonial rule to Home Rule in 1979 and later to Self-Government in 2009 is often associated with a strengthening of Greenlandic language and identity. However, aside from replacing Danish institutional terminology with Greenlandic equivalents, “little or no changes were made to the colonial governance structures of Greenland in the self-government agreement”. This continuity is particularly evident in the linguistic domain, where formal recognition of Greenlandic has not displaced Danish from its dominant role in administration, law, and education.

Legislatively, Greenlandic occupies a central position. The Self-Government Act of 2009 declares it the official language and the Language Policy Act of 2010 establishes its development as a “complete and community-bearing language”, while also promoting multilingualism and reducing language barriers. Nevertheless, this framework fails to create a clear hierarchy in respect to Danish. In fact, Section 3 of the 2010 Act explicitly allows Danish to be used for official purposes alongside Greenlandic, thus codifying bilingualism but without addressing the asymmetries that shape how these languages function in practice.

These asymmetries are particularly visible in the sphere of public administration, where Danish remains “very much the language of power in the administration”. This situation is tied both to historical dependence on Danish legislative models and institutional frameworks, as well as to a shortage of highly educated local labour, so that many positions requiring higher education are filled by Danes. Since these employees often do not speak Greenlandic, Danish becomes the default language of communication in the administration and, consequently, a gatekeeping mechanism. Danish proficiency is effectively a prerequisite for administrative employment (Ibid.), placing Greenlanders who lack advanced Danish skills at a disadvantage. Instead, familiarity with Greenlandic is often recommended but actually not required.

Also the education system plays a central role in reproducing this hierarchy. At the level of primary and lower secondary schooling, Greenlandic is one of the main languages of instruction, alongside Danish, with English introduced as an additional language. However, this balance shifts dramatically in upper secondary education, where Danish becomes the primary medium of instruction. This transition creates a structural barrier for students whose strongest language is Greenlandic. This linguistic imbalance extends into higher education. Due to a lack of Greenlandic-language materials and qualified lecturers, Danish and English are the dominant languages of instruction and research communication at the University of Greenland, while Greenlandic occupies a marginal position. Consequently, students who struggle with Danish or English thus face higher risks of dropping out. At the same time, the broader sociopolitical context reinforces the importance of Danish. Greenlanders, as Danish citizens, have significant opportunities through the Danish higher education quota system to study in Denmark, where Danish and English dominate academic life. While these arrangements are intended to promote equality and mobility, they also reinforce the centrality of Danish as a language of advancement.

Finally, with regard to the judicial field, both Greenlandic and Danish can be used in court proceedings, reflecting an official commitment to bilingualism. However, the implementation of this principle is uneven. Legal documents, especially if produced by public authorities, are often in Danish, and translation practices can be inconsistent, leading to confusion and misunderstandings.

The processes of marginalisation of Greenlandic language and its community have an impact also in the digital domain, es exemplified by the case of Greenlandic Wikipedia. As showed by a 2025 MIT report, much of the Greenlandic-language edition had been filled not by fluent speakers but by non-speakers using machine translation tools that produced grammatical errors, meaningless words, and factual absurdities. Kenneth Wehr, who tried to rescue the site, found that many pages only looked plausibly Greenlandic to outsiders; in reality, they were often unreadable or incorrect. This matters beyond Wikipedia itself. For a relatively under-resourced language such as Greenlandic, Wikipedia can become one of the main bodies of text available online, meaning that bad machine-translated content may then be recycled into the training data of future AI systems. The result is a recursive “doom loop”: poor AI translations generate poor Greenlandic text online, that text is then scraped to train new models, and the next round of translations becomes unreliable in turn. In Greenland’s case, this is especially damaging due to the structural pressure already faced by Greenlandic in administration and education. If one of the main digital spaces where Greenlandic should gain visibility instead becomes saturated with nonsense generated by outsiders, then technological modernisation does not strengthen the language but further undermines its use and survival in precisely the domains where smaller languages now need to survive.

Against this broader background, the dynamics of linguistic inequality in Greenland are nevertheless not limited to the relationship between Danish and Greenlandic. Within Greenlandic itself, a hierarchy exists that marginalises certain varieties in favour of the standard language, Kalaallisut. This standard is based on the dialect of the west coast and serves as the language of education, media, and official communication. While this standardisation may facilitate communication and nation-building, it also creates internal disparities. The linguistic distance between Kalaallisut and the other major varieties (Tunumiisut in the east and Inuktun in the far north) is considerable, resulting in limited mutual intelligibility. Despite this, Kalaallisut is the only variety that receives institutional support. Speakers of Tunumiisut and Inuktun are therefore required to learn and use Kalaallisut in formal contexts, even though it is not their native language. This situation can be described as one of asymmetrical diglossia. Speakers of Tunumiisut and Inuktun use their own varieties at home and within the local community, but must rely on Kalaallisut for education, administration, and public life. This asymmetry has generated resentment among speakers of marginalised varieties, particularly in East Greenland, where historical isolation has reinforced linguistic distinctiveness. The marginalisation of these varieties is not only linguistic but also social and political, since speakers of Tunumiisut have felt excluded also from the nation-building project, a dynamic labelled as internal “colonialist suppression”. According to this perspective, the privileging of Kalaallisut creates inequalities in access to education, resources, and democratic participation, contributing to the assimilation and disempowerment of local communities.

For these reasons, two layers of inequality (external and internal) coexist in Greenland and contribute to a complex linguistic landscape. The internal dynamic between Kalaallisut on the one hand and Tunumiisut and Inuktun on the other mirrors the external relationship between Greenlandic and Danish. Just as Danish functions as a dominant language that structures access to power, Kalaallisut occupies a similar position within Greenland. The processes of standardisation and nation-building, while aimed at strengthening Greenlandic identity, thus also reproduce hierarchies that marginalise linguistic diversity.

These dynamics are further complicated by broader global and economic forces. The prospect of increased resource extraction and foreign investment is likely to bring new linguistic influences, particularly English and Chinese: large-scale mining projects may rely on international labour, with English emerging as a workplace language. This could introduce an additional layer to the existing hierarchy, further challenging the position of Greenlandic.What emerges from this picture is not a simple opposition between colonial and postcolonial language regimes, but a more intricate interplay of continuity and change. Legislative measures have sought to promote Greenlandic and to frame multilingualism as a resource, yet structural inequalities persist. Danish remains deeply embedded in the institutions that shape social mobility, while internal processes of standardisation create new forms of marginalisation. Accordingly, the Greenlandic case thus highlights the limits of formal language policy in addressing deeper patterns of inequality. Declaring a language official or promoting it in legislation does not automatically transform the social and institutional conditions in which languages operate. Without changes in education, labour markets, and administrative practices, linguistic hierarchies can endure even in contexts of political autonomy.

At the same time, the internal marginalisation of Tunumiisut and Inuktun raises questions about the relationship between language, identity, and nation-building. Efforts to create a unified linguistic identity can inadvertently suppress diversity, reproducing dynamics of exclusion that mirror colonial patterns. Recognising and supporting linguistic plurality within Greenland may therefore be as important as addressing the legacy of Danish dominance.