Nawathinehena is an extinct Algonquian language formerly spoken among the

Arapaho people 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 ...

. It had a

phonological development Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language (phonology) during their stages of growth. Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and ...

quite different from either

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 ...

or Arapaho proper. It has been identified as the former language of the Southern Arapaho, who switched to speaking Arapaho proper in the 19th century. However, the language is not well attested, being documented only in a vocabulary collected in 1899 by

Alfred L. Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first ...

from the Oklahoma Arapaho. While it shares many important phonological innovations with Arapaho, it presents the merger of *r, *θ and *s with *t as t instead of n as in Arapaho, a sound change reminiscent of Blackfoot and Cheyenne (Goddard 1974, Jacques 2013). PA *w changes to m instead of merging with *r, *s and *n as n.

Notes

References

* *Jacques, Guillaume 2013
The sound change s>n in Arapaho
Folia Linguistica Historica 34:43-57 *Mithun, Marianne 1999. ''The Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

OLAC resources in and about the Nawathinehena language
Arapaho Plains Algonquian languages Indigenous languages of the North American Plains Languages of the United States Extinct languages of North America {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub