Arctic Yearbook 2014
32
Distribution
of
public
Financing
2012
(1000
DKK.)
821,768
792,361
Production
and
import
taxes
Continuous
income-‐
and
capital
gains
taxes
Other
income
3,653,461
EU
institutions
4,418,303
Block
grant
and
other
subsidies
from
the
Danish
Government
Direct
Danish
operating
costs
985,480
312,498
Figure 3: Distribution of the main sources of funding for the public economy of Greenland, which includes selfgovernment, municipal and state government spending for 2012. As shown, Denmark, and to a lesser extent the EU,
finances half of public spending. (Source Statistics Greenland date)
A Bilingual Society
The Greenlandic language is far from the Indo-European family of languages and has a
fundamentally different structure and organization. It is a language developed by and for a hunting
culture. It is particularly suitable for oral communication in relation to the daily life unfolding in a
hunting society whereas the practical and topical focus seemingly makes it more difficult to discuss
some abstractions e.g. relating to engineering. There is no original written language, and it was
Europeans who introduced today’s written Greenlandic (Olsen 2004; Lidegaard 1993).
Linguistic developments are constantly going on in which a number of foreign words are partly
incorporated, but equally, a number of new Greenlandic words are created in order to describe
modern things or situations. Despite this, it remains a technical challenge to translate Danish
administrative, academic, legal or technical texts to Greenlandic, and these translations are often
difficult to understand for the Greenlandic population. Sometimes different translations of the same
texts provide such diverse results that they offer possibilities of quite different interpret