The Arapahoan languages are a subgroup of the
Plains group of
Algonquian languages
The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically simi ...
:
Nawathinehena,
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 ba ...
, and
Gros Ventre.
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
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