[5][6][7] Because of this, Eastern and Atkan Aleut are classified as "critically endangered and extinct"[8] and have an Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) rating of 7.

The overwhelming majority of schools in the historically Aleut-speaking regions lack any language/culture courses in their curriculum, and those that do fail to produce fluent or even proficient speakers.

[10] The Eskimo and Aleut peoples were part of a migration from Asia across Beringia, the Bering land bridge between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago.

[13] This second westward expansion is characterized as a period of cultural affinity with southeastern Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast,[14] which may explain linguistic features that Aleut shares with neighboring non-Eskimo languages, such as rules of plural formation.

[18] Within the Eastern group are the dialects of the Alaskan Peninsula, Unalaska, Belkofski, Akutan, the Pribilof Islands, Kashega and Nikolski.

Each cell indicates the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representation of the phoneme; consonants existing only in loanwords are in parentheses.

[3] Modern Eastern Aleut has a much simpler consonant inventory because the voice contrasts among nasals, sibilants and approximants have been lost.

[4][20] The mid-vowels [ɔ] and [ɛ] occur only in family names like Nevzorof and very recently introduced Russian loanwords.

The result will be a sequence of vowels or full contraction: The modern practical Aleut orthography was designed in 1972 for the Alaskan school system's bilingual program:[21] The historic Aleut (Cyrillic) alphabet found in both Alaska and Russia has the standard pre-1918 Russian orthography as its basis, although a number of Russian letters were used only in loanwords.

[22][23][24] A total of 24+ letters were used to represent distinctly Aleut words, including 6 vowels (а, и, й, у, ю, я) and 16 consonants (г, г̑, д, з, к, ԟ, л, м, н, ҥ, с, т, ў, х, х̑, ч).

Other word classes include pronouns, contrastives, quantifiers, numerals, positional nouns, demonstratives, and interrogatives.

[4] Ordinary nouns have suffixes for [25] [citation needed] The anaphoric third person refers to a proceeding term, specified by being marked in the relative case or from context.

In possessive constructions, Aleut marks both possessor and possessum, with the possessor preceding the possessum: tayaĝu-x̂man-ABStayaĝu-x̂man-ABS'[the] man'ada-x̂father-ABSada-x̂father-ABS'[the] father'tayaĝu-mman-RELada-afather-POSSMtayaĝu-m ada-aman-REL father-POSSM'the man's father'The verbal predicate of a simple sentence of the final clause of a complex sentence carries the temporal and modal marking in relation to the speech act.

'If a 3rd person complement or subordinate part of it is omitted, as known from context, there is an anaphoric suffixal reference to it in the final verb and the nominal subject is in the relative case: Piitra-mPeter-SG.RELkidu-ku-u.help-PRES-3SG.ANAPiitra-m kidu-ku-u.Peter-SG.REL help-PRES-3SG.ANA'Peter is helping him.

A typological feature shared by Aleut and Eskimo is polysynthetic derivational morphology, which can lead to some rather long words: Tingmeadalu-lie-usa--toward--naaĝ--try.to--iiĝuta--again--masu--perhaps--x̂ta--PFV--ku--PRES--x̂.-3SGTing adalu- usa- -naaĝ- -iiĝuta- -masu- -x̂ta- -ku- -x̂.me lie- -toward- -try.to- -again- -perhaps- -PFV- -PRES- -3SG'Perhaps he tried to fool me again.

The first recording of the Aleut language in lexicon form appeared in a word list of the Unalaskan dialect compiled by Captain James King on Cook's voyage in 1778.

At that time the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg became interested in the Aleut language upon hearing of Russian expeditions for trading.

In Catherine the Great's project to compile a giant comparative dictionary on all the languages spoken in what was the spread of the Russian empire at that time, she hired Peter Simon Pallas to conduct the fieldwork that would collect linguistic information on Aleut.

During an expedition from 1791 to 1792, Carl Heinrich Merck and Michael Rohbeck collected several word lists and conducted a census of the male population that included prebaptismal Aleut names.

Ioann Veniaminov, a Russian Orthodox priest who would later become a saint, arrived at Unalaska studying Unalaskan Aleut.

The religious works were translated with the help of Veniaminov's friends Ivan Pan'kov (chief of Tigalda) and Iakov Netsvetov (the priest of Atka), both of whom were native Aleut speakers.

Father Innocent Shayashnikov did much work in the Eastern Fox-Island dialect translating a Catechism, all four Gospels and Acts of Apostles from the New Testament, and an original composition in Aleut entitled: "Short Rule for a Pious Life".

Father Lavrentii Salamatov produced a Catechism, and translations of three of the four Gospels (St. Mark, St. Luke, St. John) in the Western-Atkan dialect.

Of Father Lavrentii's work, the Gospel of St. Mark was published in a revised orthography (1959), and in its original, bilingual Russian-Aleut format (2007), together with his Catechism for the youth of Atka Island (2007).

Benedykt Dybowski, a Pole, began taking word lists from the dialects of the Commander Islands in 1881, while Nikolai Vasilyevich Slyunin, a Russian doctor, did the same in 1892.

Jochelson collected his ethnographic work with the help of two Unalaskan speakers, Aleksey Yachmenev and Leontiy Sivtsov.

In 2005, the parish of All Saints of North America Orthodox Church began to re-publish all historic Aleut language texts from 1840–1940.

The first evidence of the preservation of the language came in the form of written documentation at the hands of the Russian Orthodox Church missionaries.

However, as the historical events and factors transpired, Aleut's falling out of favor has brought upon a necessity for action if the language is to survive much longer.

Such efforts amount to "100 hours of conversation, along with the transcription and translation in Aleut, that will be transferred to compact disks or DVDs".