- Nanticoke language
-
Nanticoke Spoken in United States Region Delaware, Maryland Native speakers extinct (date missing) Language family Algic- Algonquian
- Eastern
- Nanticoke
- Eastern
Language codes ISO 639-3 nnt Nanticoke is an extinct Algonquian language formerly spoken in Delaware and Maryland, United States.[1] The same language was spoken by several neighboring tribes, including the Nanticoke, which constituted the paramount chiefdom; the Choptank, the Assateague, and probably also the Piscataway and the Doeg.
Nanticoke is sometimes considered a dialect of the Delaware language, but its vocabulary was quite distinct. This is shown in a few brief glossaries, which are all that survive of the language. One is a 146-word list compiled by Moravian[disambiguation needed
] missionary John Heckewelder in 1785, from his interview with a Nanticoke chief then living in Canada. The other is a list of 300 words obtained in 1792 by William Vans Murray, then a US Representative (at the behest of Thomas Jefferson.) He compiled the list from a Nanticoke speaker in Dorchester County, Maryland, part of the historic homeland.See also
Notes
- ^ Raymond G. Gordon, Jr, ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
External links
- Ethnologue entry for Nanticoke
- Custom lexicon: The Interactive ALR – includes all known Nanticoke data
Languages of MarylandItalics indicate extinct languagesImmigrant languages Indigenous languages Other languages Categories:- Language articles with undated speaker data
- Eastern Algonquian languages
- Indigenous languages of the Americas
- Languages of the United States
- Extinct languages of North America
- Indigenous languages of the Americas stubs
- Algonquian
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