Unami (Delaware: Wënami èlixsuwakàn)[4] is an Algonquian language initially spoken by the Lenape people in the late 17th century and the early 18th century, in the southern two-thirds of present-day New Jersey, southeastern Pennsylvania, and the northern two-thirds of Delaware.
The last fluent Unami speaker in the United States, Edward Thompson, of the federally recognized Delaware Tribe of Indians, died on August 31, 2002.
[1] His sister Nora Thompson Dean (1907–1984) provided valuable information about the language to linguists and other scholars.
[7][8][9] Compared to Munsee, Unami has undergone extensive phonological innovation, coupled with morphological regularization.
The dominant modern version of the Southern Unami dialect called Lenape is taught by the Delaware Tribe of Indians, headquartered in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which manages the Lenape Language Preservation Project.
Both Oklahoma and Delaware tribes have recorded native speakers and produced written lessons for instruction, which are available for sale from Various Indian Peoples Publishing Company, located in Texas.
Some descriptions of the Northern Unami dialect as spoken during the 18th century are given by Moravian missionary John Heckewelder.
The long consonants are described as having low functional yield, and they differentiate relatively few pairs of words but occur in contrasting environments.
Additionally, vowels are classified as strong and weak, which plays an important role in determining stress (see below).
[vague] Furthermore, some short vowels are strong even in a weakening environment; such exceptions are often marked with a grave accent.
[19] There is a predictable tendency, additionally, to nasalize and lengthen a vowel before /ns/ and /nš/, so that /lowé·nso/ ('his name is [such]') is realized closer to [luwé̹·su] from underlying /ələwe·nsəw/.
In the last case, the accent shifts to the penultimate /-an/ only if it would otherwise fall on an antepenultimate short vowel, and if the consonant between them is voiced.
In some notations the pound symbol (#) appears, indicating word boundaries (either the beginning or end).
Third-person participants can be marked by a special set of endings indicating their absence from the general area of the focus of discourse.
For example, absentative endings are used when speaking of the deceased (even if the corpse is physically present), as in the sentence no·lăčahko·ná·na nkahe·səná·na ('our (excl.)
Verbs in Unami are marked for person and number, and contain inflectional elements of order (independent, conjunct, and imperative), aspect, and the negative.
Following are tables exemplifying verbal paradigms in Unami in the independent order, indicative mood and present tense.
These are:[31] The first position (theme signs) is filled only for transitive verbs and help describe the relationship between the two participants by indicating which is the agent and which is the object.
The contrast between both categories is sharper in the Central Algonquian languages, whose theme sign has a more complex series of alternants.
Position seven contains peripheral endings, which are used to mark the nominal category of some 3rd person participants in forms in the independent and conjunct (but not imperative) orders.
Syntax is one of the least studied aspects of the Unami language; there is much more data on morphology, because of an especial focus on reconstructing Proto-Algonquian.