Nanticoke is sometimes considered a dialect of the Delaware language, but its vocabulary was quite distinct. This is shown in a few brief glossaries, which are all that survive of the language. One is a 146-word list compiled by MoravianmissionaryJohn Heckewelder in 1785, from his interview with a Nanticoke chief then living in Canada.[4] The other is a list of 300 words obtained in 1792 by William Vans Murray, then a US Representative (at the behest of Thomas Jefferson.) He compiled the list from a Nanticoke speaker in Dorchester County, Maryland, part of the historic homeland.[5]
Modern Nanticoke
With the assistance of a native speaker, Myrelene Ranville nee Henderson of the Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba Canada, who speaks a similar language, Anishnabay, a group of Nanticoke people in Millsboro, Delaware, assembled to revive the language in 2007, using the vocabulary list of Thomas Jefferson. It had been "more than 150 years since the last conversation in Nanticoke took place."[6]
^Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Nanticoke". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
^Raymond G. Gordon, Jr, ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
^Heckewelder, John (2003). Heckewelder's Vocabulary of Nanticoke. American Language Reprints 31. Evolution Pub & Manufacturing. ISBN 9781889758305. Retrieved 2012-09-23.
Vans Murray, William (2009). A Vocabulary of the Nanticoke Dialect. American Language Reprints. Evolution Pub & Manufacturing. ISBN 9780964423435. Retrieved 2012-09-23.