The Yup'ik language is one of four or five Yupik languages branch of Eskimo–Aleut languages. Yup'ik is the largest ethnic group in Alaska and is the language now spoken by the largest number of native persons. The Yup'ik, like all Northern Indigenous languages, is a suffixing language made up of noun and verb bases to which one or more postbases and a final ending or enclitics are added to denote such features as number, case, person, and position. The Yup'ik category of number distinguishes singular, plural, and dual. Yup'ik does not have a category of gender and articles. The Yup'ik orthography one sees nowadays was developed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the 1960s by native speakers of Yup'ik elders working with linguists. The Yup'ik are the most numerous of the various Alaska Natives. There are 10,400 speakers out of a population of 25,000, and the language is threatened in 2007, according to Alaska Native Language Center.