Munsee grammar

Munsee (also known as Munsee Delaware, Delaware, Ontario Delaware) is an endangered language of the Eastern Algonquian subgroup of the Algonquian language family, itself a branch of the Algic language family.

The grammar of Munsee is characterized by complex inflectional and derivational morphology. Inflection in Munsee is realized through the use of prefixes and suffixes added to word stems to indicate grammatical information, including number (singular or plural), animacy (understood as grammatical gender), person, possession, negation, and obviation.

Nouns use combinations of person prefixes and suffixes to indicate possession and suffixes to indicate gender, number, diminution, absentation, and obviation.

Verbs use a single set of person prefixes and a series of suffixes in position classes after the verb stem to indicate combinations of person, number, negation, obviation, and other morphological information.