Unami language

E60059

The Unami language is an Eastern Algonquian Native American language traditionally spoken by the Lenape (Delaware) people in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

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Statements (50)

Predicate Object
instanceOf Eastern Algonquian language
Native American language
endangered language
alternativeName Southern Unami
surface form: Delaware Unami

Southern Delaware language
closelyRelatedTo Mahican language
Munsee language
documentedBy linguist Ives Goddard
linguist John O. Rankin
endonym Lënapei Lënu
ethnicGroup Delaware people
Lenape
surface form: Lenape people
glottocode unam1245
hasDialects Northern Unami
Southern Unami
Unalachtigo
hasGrammaticalFeature animate–inanimate noun gender system
direct–inverse verb morphology
locative and obviative nominal suffixes
obviative marking
person hierarchy in verb agreement
hasPhonologicalFeature contrastive vowel length
rich consonant inventory including affricates
historicalUse lingua franca among some mid-Atlantic tribes
influencedToponym place names in Delaware
place names in New Jersey
place names in Pennsylvania
ISO639-3 unm
languageFamily Algic languages
surface form: Algic language family
morphologicalType agglutinative language
polysynthetic language
revitalizationEfforts documentation and dictionary projects
language classes in Lenape communities
spokenBy Lenape communities in Oklahoma
Lenape communities in Ontario
Lenape communities in Wisconsin
status severely endangered
subfamilyOf Algonquian languages
Eastern Algonquian languages
syntacticType head-marking language
traditionalRegion Delaware Valley
surface form: Delaware River Valley

Mid-Atlantic states
surface form: Mid-Atlantic region of the United States

parts of present-day Delaware
parts of present-day New Jersey
parts of present-day New York
parts of present-day Pennsylvania
usedIn Lenape ceremonial contexts
Lenape traditional stories
wordOrder flexible word order
writingSystem Latin script

Referenced by (3)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

Mahican language closelyRelatedTo Unami language
Munsee language closelyRelatedTo Unami language
Algonquian languages includesLanguage Unami language