Lenape language
| Unami | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Eastern United States |
| Region | Around the lower Delaware and Hudson rivers in the United States; some Unami groups in Oklahoma |
| Extinct | 2002 |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | unam1242 |
Map showing the aboriginal boundaries of Delaware territories, with Munsee territory and Unami dialectal divisions indicated. The territory of the poorly known Unalachtigo dialect of Unami is not clearly indicated, but is presumed to be approximately in the area of "Sankhikan" on the map.
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Unami is an Algonquian language spoken by Lenape people in what was then the lower Hudson Valley area and New York Harbor area, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, but later in Ontario and Oklahoma. It is one of the two Delaware languages, the other being Munsee. The last fluent speaker in the United States, Edward Thompson, of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, died on 31 August 2002. His sister Nora Thompson Dean (1907–1984) provided valuable information about the language to linguists and other scholars.
Lenape is from /lənaːpːe/, a word in the Unami dialect whose most literal translation into English would be "common person". The Lenape names for the areas they inhabited were Scheyichbi (i.e. New Jersey), which means "water's edge", and Lenapehoking, meaning "in the land of the Delaware Indians", although the latter is a term coined by the Unami speaker Nora Thompson Dean in 1984, to describe the ancient homeland of all Delaware Indians, both Unami and Munsee. The English named the river running through much of the traditional range of the Lenape after the first governor of the Jamestown Colony, Lord De La Warr, and consequently referred to the people who lived around the river as "Delaware Indians".
Unami is an Eastern Algonquian language. The hypothetical common ancestor language from which the Eastern Algonquian languages descend is Proto-Eastern Algonquian (PEA). An intermediate group Delawarean that is a descendant of Proto-Eastern Algonquian consists of Mahican and Common Delaware, the latter being a further subgroup comprising Munsee Delaware and Unami Delaware. The justification for Delawarean as an intermediate subgroup rests upon the high degree of similarity between Mahican and the two Delaware languages, but relatively little detailed argumentation in support of Delawarean has been adduced. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics lists Tla Wilano as one of the Delaware or Unami related languages. Until recently, Tla Wilano was spoken by members of the Ani-Stohini/Unami Nation in Virginia. Now there is only one speaker.
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