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Lenape/Mohican Language

Respectfully submitted, to the people by the Language & Culture Committee:

In early 2004 the Language and Culture Committee had set a goal to provide our people with our native language. We had acknowledged that our tribe is mixed with Delaware and Mohican, and other Algonquin Tribes. Therefore we had decided that it would only be fair to provide as much of both as we could.

Molly Miller, who has been working on Lenape language for years, has now formulated a Lenape language program. When she had come to our board meeting and presented to us what she had in mind; we acknowledged her work and gave her our support for the project, leaving it on ourselves to work on the Mohican Language.

There are no more fluent Mohican Speakers, however there are Mohican speakers such as myself, Adrian Vele, and Jeremy Mohawk who all use the language in ceremony, prayers, songs, and everyday usage. It is not enough to just learn words; we learn sentence structure and verb/noun conjugations as well.

It was once thought that the Mohican Language has been lost and cannot be found. This is an untrue statement. There are enough materials found in the last 25 years that the Language and Culture Committee find it overwhelmingly possible to revive the ancient words of our ancestors and eventually have a full working language.

I have been taught that our ancestors have left things on our path for us to find to use again. We see these things all the time, whether we choose to pick them up and utilize them is up to us.

We wish to provide as much of both languages as possible for individuals to learn and pass down to our future generations. Neither language is in competition or wishes to conflict with one another.