Nawathinehena is an extinct Algonquian language formerly spoken among the

Arapaho The Arapaho ( ; , ) 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 bands formed t ...

. It had a phonological development quite different from either

Gros Ventre The Gros Ventre ( , ; meaning 'big belly'), also known as the A'aninin, Atsina, or White Clay, are a historically Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe located in northcentral Montana. Today, the Gros Ventre people are enrolled in the Fort ...

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 from the Oklahoma Arapaho.

Phonology

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. PA *w changes to m instead of merging with *r, *s and *n as n.

Vocabulary

Some numbers of the Nawathinehena language:

Notes

Works cited

* *

General references

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 {{Algonquian-lang-stub