Unami Language
Unami is an extinct Algonquian language formerly spoken by Lenape people in what is now 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. Speakers have shifted to English.
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."
Read more about Unami Language: History, Revival Attempts, Syntax
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“But as some silly young men returning from France affect a broken English, to be thought perfect in the French language; so his Lordship, I think, to seem a perfect understander of the unintelligible language of the Schoolmen, pretends an ignorance of his mother-tongue. He talks here of command and counsel as if he were no Englishman, nor knew any difference between their significations.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)