Lenni-Lenape

Lenni-Lenape is the Delawaran group of Eastern Algonquian languages, comprising Unami and Munsee, the tongues of the Lenape or Delaware people, and Mahican, spoken by their Hudson valley kinsmen. Lenni Lenape means the original or genuine people, while Delaware is an English name taken from the river named after Lord De La Warr.

The Lenape homeland covered the Delaware valley, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and the area around New York Bay and the lower Hudson. Settlers crowded in from the early 1600s; the fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737 stripped the Lenape of land and opened a series of removals through Ohio and beyond.

Moravian missionaries gave the language its first stable Latin orthography and compiled its earliest grammars and dictionaries. In 1782 Pennsylvania militiamen killed ninety-six unarmed Christian Lenape at Gnadenhütten in Ohio, deepening the dispersal of the Delawaran languages.