Okay, well this is actually a really interesting question.

Before we go further, I need you all to commit to memory the following diagram*:

*All diagrams from Fortescue’s Eskimo Orientation Systems (1988)

Got that? Oh there’s also this one.

Let’s focus on point “c” in the first diagram, which represents Nuuk or standard West Greenlandic.

The compass points here are (in extended form, with standard third person singular ending):

N - avannaa

E - kangia

S - kujataa

W - kitaa

But if we look at point “a”, Ammassalik in East Greenland, (sorry about image quality):

We see that “av-” no longer points north but closer to south. And all the other alternative designations from point “c” have become directionally reversed! (i.e. allowing for sound changes, each of pav-/pu-, sam-/sav-, qav-/qav- now points in the opposite direction)

So what is going on here? As Map 1 suggests, which compares the directional systems across the entire Inuit language continuum (and wider Eskimo-Aleut domain), there is a lot of individual variation, and the relationships between neighbouring areas can even be a “mirror” one, whereas the relationship between West Greenland and East Greenland is a rotational one.

The answer is based in the fact that the concepts of “true north”, “true east”, etc are not native to Inuit dialects but rather the terms used locally are reflective of the environment in which each community has lived. Each term has an underlying meaning that relates to that environment in some way, so:

avannaa is from Proto-Eskimo (PE) avan (from a demonstrative av- “over (there)”) meaning “area around”/”surroundings”, which over time in West Greenlandic has semantically moved to mean “off from land”, and in turn with -naq (something resembling) giving avannaq with specific meaning “north wind”, and from there with 3s possessive giving avannaa, now meaning generically “north”. But in East Greenlandic, which was derived from West Greenlandic as a wave of Greenlanders steadily moved south and then round the southern tip of Greenland back up the east coast, the term has retained a similar directional meaning from the perspective of being “to the right, when looking toward the sea”. And in East Greenlandic qav- therefore effectively now means the opposite “to the left, when looking toward the sea”. You can see from the diagram that Fortescue notes that av- and qav- type stems also act as similar opposite pairs (left/right or upriver/downriver) in other western Inuit dialects.

kitaa is from PE kətə- “area in front or towards the water” which has a more transparent meaning in the context of West Greenland settlements. A similar term used to exist in East Greenlandic with meaning “outwards” as shown here:

but as seen in the diagram another term kana- has taken over the meaning of east in that dialect. I also understand that more recently the West Greenlandic standard terms have been incorporated into East Greenlandic, no doubt due to some natural cultural pressure (national media presumably being almost entirely in West Greenlandic) and the fact that some of the West Greenlandic terms like kitaa (for west) no longer has a native East Greenlandic term to compete with. But it does create the unusual position that if an East Greenlander uses kitaa for west the term would literally be pointing in the opposite direction of the original meaning (i.e. now inwards, away from the sea). [NB this is perhaps no different in a sense from someone in the Southern hemisphere using the term “south”, since the etymology of this is derived from the direction of the “sun”, which for them would actually be in the north.]

So to come back to your question, “north west” in West Greenlandic is “avannaa-kitaa”, but I didn’t want to answer so quickly without giving a hint of the interesting background.