Arctic Yearbook 2014 | Page 32

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