The Arapahoan languages are a subgroup of the

Plains In geography, a plain is a flat expanse of land that generally does not change much in elevation, and is primarily treeless. Plains occur as lowlands along valleys or at the base of mountains, as coastal plains, and as plateaus or uplands. In ...

group of

Algonquian languages The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic languages, Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language f ...

Nawathinehena The Arapaho (; french: Arapahos, ) are a Native Americans in the United States, Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota p ...

Arapaho The Arapaho (; french: Arapahos, ) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota. By the 1850s, Arapaho band ...

, and

Gros Ventre The Gros Ventre ( , ; meaning "big belly"), also known as the Aaniiih, A'aninin, Haaninin, Atsina, and White Clay, are a historically Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe located in north central Montana. Today the Gros Ventre people are ...

. Nawathinehena is extinct and Arapaho and Gros Ventre are both endangered. Besawunena, attested only from a word list collected by Kroeber, differs only slightly from Arapaho, but a few of its sound changes resemble those seen in Gros Ventre. It had speakers among the Northern Arapaho as recently as the late 1920s. Nawathinehena is also attested only from a word list collected by Kroeber, and was the most divergent language of the group. Another reported Arapahoan variety is the extinct Ha'anahawunena, but there is no documentation of it.

Notes

References

* Goddard, Ives (2001). "The Algonquian Languages of the Plains." In ''Plains, Part I'', ed. Raymond J. DeMallie. Vol. 13 of ''Handbook of North American Indians'', ed. William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, pp. 71–79. * Marianne Mithun (1999). ''The Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

"Arapaho"
at Native-languages.org

at Native-languages.org + Plains Algonquian languages Indigenous languages of the North American Plains Languages of the United States {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub