At the time of European arrival in North America, the Lenape Indians lived in what is now the Delaware Bay area, including the northeast corner of Maryland, the Schuylkill, Delaware and lower Hudson River valleys, and western Long Island. The Lenape were decimated by European diseases and caught in the middle of European wars, so they were forced to move further west and north. There are still communities of the Lenape in Ontario, Wisconsin and Oklahoma, where they were grouped with the Cherokee for decades.
The Lenape language had three distinct dialects: Munsee to the north, and northern and southern Unami (or Nanticoke) further south. The three dialects of Lenapi are branches of the Eastern Algonquian family of languages. Munsee and Unami are very similar to the Mahican dialect of the Hudson River Valley. Unami is a polysynthetic language, meaning that the words, especially the verbs, often have many morphemes, or units of meaning. Nouns are either animate or inanimate, and either present or absent, and verbs are conjugated accordingly.
There are no more fluent speakers of the language, though the younger generations are trying to preserve it as a second language. A version of the southern Unami dialect is taught in some Lenape communities in Oklahoma, and a Lenape “Talking Dictionary” is available online.