Unami language

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Unami
Spoken in	Eastern United States
Region	Around the lower Delaware and Hudson rivers in the United States; some Unami groups in Oklahoma
Total speakers	Extinct
Language family	Algic Algonquian Eastern Algonquian Delaware Unami
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	–
ISO 639-3	unm
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Unami is an extinct Algonquian language formerly spoken by the Lenape people in what is now New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but later in Oklahoma. It is one of the two Delaware languages, the other being Munsee. Speakers have shifted to English.^[1]

Lenape is from /lənaːpːe/, a word in the Unami dialect whose most literal translation into English would be "the real people".^[2][3] (The common schoolbook term, Lenni-Lenape is not correct, but translates as, "the original real-people"). The Lenape names for the areas they inhabited were Scheyichbi, which means, "the place bordering the ocean", and Lenapehoking, meaning "place where the people live", although the latter is not universally accepted as historical.^[4]

The Order of the Arrow, an affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America, attempts to preserve some legends and language elements of the Lenape tribe. Numerous local lodges of the Order of the Arrow do not emulate the customs of the Lenape alone, but mingle the Lenape customs with those of dissimilar tribes (e.g., the Cherokee).

A modern version of the Southern Unami dialect called Western Delaware is being taught by the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma. It is called Western because it was spoken by the Delaware Indians in the Western part of Oklahoma. The tribe has created tapes of native speakers and written lessons available for sale, in an attempt to preserve the language. Some descriptions of the language as spoken in Pennsylvania during the 18th century is given by Moravian missionary John Heckewelder.^[5]

Contents 1 Phonology 1.1 Consonants and vowels 2 Notes 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Phonology

Unami has been analyzed as having contrastive geminate and non-geminate obstruent consonants.^[6] The length mark (ː) is used to indicate gemination of a preceding consonant or vowel length, although in the literature on Unami the raised dot (·) is often used for these purposes.^[7] In the following chart, the usual transcription used in the sources is given with the IPA in brackets. A full analysis of the status of the geminates, also known as long consonants, is not available, and more than one analysis of Delaware consonants has been proposed. The long consonants are described as having low functional yield, that is they differentiate relatively few pairs of words but do occur in contrasting environments. There are also rules that lengthen consonants in certain environments.^[8]

[edit] Consonants and vowels

Consonants

	Bilabial	Dental	Postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Stop	p [p]	t [t̪]	č [tʃ]	k [k]
Fricative		s [s]	š [ʃ]	x [x]	h [h]
Nasal	m [m]	n [n]
Lateral		l [l]
Glide	w [w]		j [j]

Unami vowels are presented as organized into contrasting long-short pairs.^[9] One asymmetry is that high short /u/ is paired with long /oː/, and the pairing of long and short /ə/ is noteworthy.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
High-long	i:		o:
Mid	e	ə	ɔ
Mid-long	e:	ə:	ɔ:
Low	a
Low-long	a:

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Ethnologue entry for Unami
• Goddard, Ives. 1979. Delaware Verbal Morphology. New York: Garland. [published version of 1979 Harvard University dissertation in linguistics] ISBN 978-0824096854
• Goddard, Ives. 1997. "Pidgin Delaware.” Sarah G. Thomason, ed., Contact Languages: A Wider Perspective, pp. 43-98. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-1556191725

[edit] External links

• Delaware (Lenape) Tribe of Indians
• Delaware Nation of Oklahoma
• Lenape Talking Dictionary