James Rementer and Bruce Pearson helped the Delaware Tribe of Indians of Bartlesville, Oklahoma create a lexical database of the Lenape or Delaware Indian language. Lenape is an eastern Algonquian language historically spoken in southeastern New York State, all of New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and the northern part of the State of Delaware. Many place names in the eastern United States originate from this language, e.g. Manhattan. In this sense, the Lenape language is part of the heritage of the Lenape people and also the wider US English-speaking community.
Work on the Lenape Language Database Project began in 1997 and was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation. The database in its current form includes 15,460 single-word entries with sound files, 22 linguistically analyzed narratives and 4 hymns. The current project, Lenape Language Online Dictionary Project, will add data from lists of Lenape words collected between the 1600s and 1800s. This addition will allow for commentary on Lenape historical lexical development. The computational sophistication of the search parameters will be developed so that grammatical information will be linked to words to provide semantic and grammatical context to the lexical entries. Consultants on the project include Delaware tribal member and professor of German, Dr. Grant Leneaux and author and expert on early materials on the Lenape, Raymond Whritenour. The resulting products will create a link betwtee the Lenape community and their heritage language.
