Southcentral Alaska is the portion of the U.S. state of Alaska consisting of the shorelines and uplands of the central Gulf of Alaska. Most of the population of the state lives in this region, concentrated in and around the city of Anchorage.

The area includes Cook Inlet, the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, the Kenai Peninsula, Prince William Sound, and the Copper River Valley. Tourism, fisheries, and petroleum production are important economic activities.

The major city is Anchorage. Other towns include Palmer, Wasilla, Kenai, Soldotna, Homer, Seward, Valdez, and Cordova.

The climate of Southcentral Alaska is mild. Temperatures range from an average high of 65°F in July to an average low of 10°F in December. The hours of daylight per day varies from 18 hours in June and July to 6 hours in December and January. The costal areas consist of temperate rainforests and alder shrublands. The interior areas are covered by boreal forests.

The terrain of Southcentral Alaska is shaped by five mountain ranges:

Central Alaskan Yup'ik or just Yup'ik (also called Yupik, Central Yup'ik, or indigenously Yugtun) is one of the languages of Yupik family, in turn a member of the Eskimo–Aleut language group, spoken in western and southwestern Alaska. Both in ethnic population and in number of speakers, Central Alaskan Yup'ik is the largest of the languages spoken by Alaska Natives. As of 2010 it was also the second largest aboriginal language in the United States in terms of numbers of speakers.

Central Alaskan Yup'ik lies geographically and linguistically between Alutiiq and Central Siberian Yupik. The use of the apostrophe in Central Alaskan Yup'ik, as opposed to Siberian Yupik, denotes a long p. The word Yup'ik represents not only the language but also the name for the people themselves (yuk, 'person,' and pik, 'real'.)

Of a total population of more than 23,000 people, more than 14,000 are speakers of the language. Children still grow up speaking Yup'ik as their first language in 17 of 68 Yup'ik villages, those mainly located on the lower Kuskokwim River, on Nelson Island, and along the coast between the Kuskokwim River and Nelson Island.

Alaska (ⁱ/əˈlæskə/) is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait. Alaska is the 4th least populous and the least densely populated of the 50 United States. Approximately half of Alaska's 722,718 residents live within the Anchorage metropolitan area.

Alaska was purchased from Russia on March 30, 1867, for $7.2 million ($120 million in today's^[when?] dollars) at approximately two cents per acre ($4.74/km²). The land went through several administrative changes before becoming an organized (or incorporated) territory on May 11, 1912, and the 49th state of the U.S. on January 3, 1959.

The name "Alaska" (Аляска) was already introduced in the Russian colonial period, when it was used only for the peninsula and is derived from the Aleut alaxsxaq, meaning "the mainland" or, more literally, "the object towards which the action of the sea is directed". It is also known as Alyeska, the "great land", an Aleut word derived from the same root.