[6] Several shared phonological innovations support a genetic subgroup consisting of the Delaware languages and Mahican,[7] sometimes referred to as Delawaran.

[9] Their autonym is also spelled Lennape or Lenapi, in Unami Lënape[10] and in Munsee Lunaapeew[11] meaning 'the people.'

They named the river in honor of Lord De La Warr, the governor of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia.

[14] At the time of first contact of Europeans colonizers in the 17th century, the Lenape resided in relatively small communities consisting of a few hundred people.

[15] The intensity of contact with European settlers resulted in the gradual displacement of some of the Lenape people from their aboriginal homeland, in a series of population movements of genocidal intent involving forced relocation and consolidation of small local groups, extending over a period of more than two hundred years.

The currently used names were gradually applied to the larger groups resulting from the genocidal forced relocation policy of the United States.

The ultimate result was the displacement of virtually all Lenape-speaking people from the region to present-day Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin, Upstate New York, and Canada.

Equally affected by consolidation and dispersal, Munsee groups moved to several locations in southern Ontario as early as the late 18th century, to Moraviantown, Munceytown, and Six Nations.

[17] In 1892 the Munsee-Delaware and Moraviantown children were sent to Mount Elgin Residential School where only English language was permitted to be spoken.

There are no fluent speakers left in the Munsee-Delaware nation of the Lenape people living in Canada; however, there are members that are working to revitalize the language within the community.

[20] The class focused on beginner phrases and grammar, but also included information about the history and culture of the Lenape people.

Books used in the class included Conversations in Lenape Language and Advanced Supplements (both written by De Paul).

Zeisberger does not even mention the "dialect" names when describing varying grammatical features, while the translator refers to them in two annotations.

[21] Despite their relative closeness the two are sufficiently distinguished by features of syntax, phonology, and vocabulary that speakers of both consider them not mutually intelligible so that, more recently, linguists have treated them as separate languages.

Northern Unami, now extinct, is recorded in large amounts of materials collected by Moravian missionaries but is not reflected in the speech of any modern groups.

[26] The poorly known Unalachtigo dialect is described as having been spoken in the area between Northern and Southern Unami, with only a small amount of evidence from one group.

[38] Munsee and Unami have similar but not identical inventories of consonants and vowels, and have a significant number of phonological rules in common.

[41] This section focuses upon presenting general information about Munsee and Unami sounds and phonology, with detailed discussion reserved for entries for each language.

[51] More recent borrowings tend to be from English such as the following Munsee loan words: ahtamó·mpi·l 'automobile'; kátəl 'cutter'; nfó·təw 's/he votes'.

However, the people who are enrolled in the Delaware Tribe of Indians have developed a spelling system that is the most recent standard for writing in the Unami dialect.

Out of respect to this intellectual property of The Delaware Tribe of Indians their standard for writing in the Unami dialect should be used.

[55] Practical orthographies for both Munsee and Unami have been created in the context of various language preservation and documentation projects.

[59][60] The linguistic system uses the acute accent to indicate predictable stress and a raised dot (·) to indicate vowel and consonant length.

Similarly, the breve accent is used to indicate an ultra-short [ə] that typically occurs before a single voiced consonant followed by a vowel.