This book presents a study of the development of time reference in young children acquiring Inuktitut as a first language. The first such study of an Eskimo-Aleut language, it makes a unique contribution to the tense-aspect acquisition literature with an account of children's development of a temporal system that is fundamentally different from those found in languages previously studied. Drawing on spontaneous speech data collected longitudinally from eight Inuit children between 2 and 3-and-a-half years old, this study analyzes the temporal structures, their meanings and context of use in the children's communicative interactions with siblings, peers and caretakers during the early stages of language development.