Inupiaq and Yupik interpreting for courts, hospitals and agencies, mostly by phone and video, with the language and the region confirmed before anyone is booked.
Prism Linguistics answers requests for an Eskimo interpreter with the languages actually meant, Inupiaq and Yupik, supplying interpreters for court hearings, medical appointments and agency meetings across Alaska and the United States by phone, video or in person, and translators for English notices into those languages and for Inuktitut and Greenlandic records into English.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Eskimo is the word people still type into a search box, and it is not the name of any language. It is an outdated label for two groups of Alaska Native languages, Inupiaq in the north of the state and the Yupik languages in the west, along with their relatives in Canada and Greenland. This page is about the Alaskan two, because that is where the US demand is. Their speakers are US citizens, born in Alaska, so the work is courts, hospitals, agencies and Native corporations rather than immigration. Our office is in New York; the linguists are in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.
The Alaska Court System lists Yup'ik and Inupiaq among the languages it serves, pays for interpreters at every court location, and has said openly that both languages are primarily oral and that no test yet exists to assess their interpreters. Alaska made twenty Native languages official in 2014, Inupiaq and Yup'ik among them, though the law creates no duty to supply an interpreter. Inupiaq has fewer than 2,500 fully proficient speakers on the Alaska Native Language Center's estimate, and most of them are elders.
Inupiaq and Yup'ik are not dialects of each other. They belong to separate branches and are not mutually intelligible, so an interpreter booked for the wrong one cannot do the job at all. Central Alaskan Yup'ik around Bethel and the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, Siberian Yupik on St. Lawrence Island, and Inupiaq from Kotzebue up to the North Slope each need their own interpreter. Tell us the village and we assign from there.
In Alaska the court arranges and pays for the interpreter, and its own language access plan is candid that Yup'ik and Inupiaq interpreters are scarce and untested. Where Prism comes in is the case outside that system: an Alaska Native elder as a witness in a Washington or Oregon court, a family or tribal matter heard in the Lower 48, or an attorney who needs an interpreter for the preparation and depositions the court does not cover. No state certifies court interpreters in either language. We supply a qualified Inupiaq or Yup'ik interpreter, usually by video, and we say plainly that we are a private agency and not a court-appointed vendor.
Elders travel from the villages to Anchorage, Seattle and Portland for specialist care, and the federal funding those hospitals take obliges them to provide an interpreter free of charge. In practice a grandchild interprets, and a diagnosis or a medication schedule gets abbreviated on the way. A Yup'ik or Inupiaq medical interpreter by video handles a consult or a consent conversation the same day. For a long hospital stay far from home we can arrange someone in person with notice, and where the family prefers it we look for an interpreter from the same region.
With so few speakers, phone and video are how Inupiaq and Yup'ik interpreting actually happens. A village clinic, a social services office in Fairbanks or a regional Native corporation meeting can have an interpreter on the line within the hour rather than waiting for one to fly in. The one thing we insist on is confirming the language and the region first, because the wrong branch on the line is worse than no interpreter.
Almost nothing official is written in Inupiaq or Yup'ik; Alaskan records are in English. So the translation work runs the other way: an English consent form, a court notice, a benefits letter or a public health notice rendered into Yup'ik or Inupiaq so that an elder can read it or have it read aloud. The other stream is Canadian and Greenlandic. Records from Nunavut can carry Inuktitut in syllabics or in roman letters, and Greenlandic documents come in Kalaallisut alongside Danish; we translate those into English with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy for a US filing. Our Yupik interpreter page carries the Alaskan detail, and the document service is at certified translation.
Tell us the date, the city and the setting, or send a clear scan of the document. We reply with a fixed price and, for interpreting, a named linguist. Call +1 (833) 282 8883, email info@prismlinguistics.com, or use the quote form and you will hear back within 60 minutes during business hours.
Our only office is in New York, and our Eskimo interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Eskimo work is concentrated; the full list of 288 cities is below it.
Prism Linguistics is rated 4.6 out of 5 across 67 client reviews for its interpreting and translation work in the United States. That is the company-wide figure; we do not publish a separate rating per language because there is no honest way to measure one. If an Eskimo assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.