“Half of our lives is about ice”

In Kalaallit Nunaat [ka ²la:ɬ ɬit# nu ²na:t#] (Greenland), people live close to massive ice places, whose continuous melting is driving environmental changes worldwide. To better understand in what ways living with these places shapes how they are perceived and how the shrinking of the ice, accelerated by anthropogenic climate change, is experienced locally, this paper explores the semantics of ice place words in Arctic Danish. The postcolonial semantic study is carried out within the framework of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach and informed by text corpora and semantic consultations with speakers. To lay the foundation, the paper provides a detailed contrastive study of two meanings of the conceptual building block is (‘ice’); one for its meaning in Arctic Danish and one for its meaning in Denmark-Danish. The analysis suggests that Arctic Danish’s linguistically encoded worldviews have been shaped by being in the physical environment of Kalaallit Nunaat and in contact with Kalaallisut [ka ²la:ɬ ɬi sut#] (Greenlandic). Semantic explications of the ice place words indlandsisen (lit. ‘the inland ice’) and havisen (‘the sea ice’) are then proposed, together with a related climate change script that addresses concerns about the melting of ice. The semantic explications reveal how practices central to Inuit livelihoods are closely tied to the ice places, and the script exposes how not only the places but also these cultural anchors of how people engage with the land are perceived as threatened.