The term Inuit (plural of Inuk ‘man’) refers to a group of indigenous peoples of the circumpolar regions of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. The term is also used for the continuum of language varieties spoken by the Inuit people. Inuit is a group of five closely related languages that belong to the Eskimo branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. Three of these languages, spoken in Canada and Greenland, are referred to as Inuktitut. Two languages, spoken in Alaska, are referred to as Inupiatun (Ethnologue). The Inuit people themselves use different names to refer to their own languages. The term Eskimo is a derogatory word in Algonquian that means ‘eater of raw flesh’. The nomadic Inuit people are thought to have originated in northeastern Siberia and to have began to migrate eastward across the Bering Straits to Alaska and then across northern Canada to Greenland in widely separated groups around 2,000 BC. As a result, rather than being a single language, Inuit is a continuum of varieties that are not readily comprehensible at their geographical extremes.