Any native of the Aleutian Islands and western portion of the Alaska Peninsula. The name Aleut, used in 1745 by Russian fur traders from the Kamchatka Peninsula, refers primarily to the people of the Aleutian Islands, who call themselves Unangan or Unangas, but also by extension to the Pacific Yupik, who call themselves Alutiit (plural of Alutiiq), an adaptation of the Russian name. Aleuts speak two main dialects and are physically and culturally closely related to the Eskimo. Traditional Aleut villages were located on the seashore near fresh water, where the people hunted marine mammals, fish, birds, caribou, and bear. Aleut women wove fine grass basketry; stone, bone, and ivory were also worked. After the arrival of the Russians in the 18th century, their population declined drastically. Some 6,600 people claimed sole Aleut ancestry in the 2000 U.S. census
the language spoken by the Aleut people a member of the people inhabiting the Aleutian Islands and western Alaska
Family of languages spoken in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, U.S., and eastern Siberia by the Eskimo and Aleut peoples. Aleut, distantly related to the Eskimo languages, consists of eastern and western dialects; today both are spoken by fewer than 400 people. The Eskimo languages have two subgroups: Yupik (five languages), spoken on the Chukchi Peninsula in Siberia and in southwestern Alaska; and Inupiaq-Inuktitut, a continuum of dialects spoken across arctic Alaska and Canada to the coasts of Labrador and Greenland. Yupik languages are spoken today by about 13,000 people, while Inupiaq-Inuktitut has more than 100,000 speakers, nearly half of whom speak Greenlandic Inuktitut