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The Cherokees have the oldest and best-known Native American writing system in the United States. This writing system, the Cherokee syllabary, is fully explained and used throughout this volume, the first and only complete published grammar of the Cherokee language. Although the Cherokee Reference Grammar focuses on the dialect spoken by the Cherokees in Oklahoma--the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians--it provides the grammatical foundation upon which all the dialects are based. In his introduction, author Brad Montgomery-Anderson offers a brief account of Cherokee history and language revitalization initiatives, as well as instructions for using this grammar. The book then delves into an explanation of Cherokee pronunciation, orthography, parts of speech, and syntax. Cherokee Reference Grammar will serve as a vital resource in advancing these efforts to understand Cherokee history, language, and culture on their own terms.

A Native American language formerly spoken in hundreds of communities in the interior of California, Patwin (also known as Wintun Tʼewe) is now spoken by a small but growing number of language revitalizationists and their students. A Grammar of Patwin brings together two hundred years of word lists, notebooks, audio recordings, and manuscripts from archives across the United States and synthesizes this scattered collection into the first published description of the Patwin language. This book shines a light on the knowledge of past speakers and researchers with a clear and well-organized description supported by ample archival evidence. Lewis C. Lawyer addresses the full range of grammatical structure with chapters on phonetics, phonology, nominals, nominal modifiers, spatial terms, verbs, and clauses.

Learn to communicate without words with these authentic signs! Learn over 525 signs developed by the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and other tribes. Written instructions and diagrams show you how to make the words and construct sentences. Book also contains 290 pictographs (language in pictures) of the Sioux and Ojibway tribes.

Fascinating, wide-ranging study by expert on the subject describes and illustrates signs used for specific words -- "antelope," "brave," "trade," "yes," -- for phrases, sentences and even dialogues. Scores of diagrams show precise movements of body and hands for signing. Of great interest to students of linguistics and Native American culture.

The Navajo language is spoken by the Navajo people who live in the Navajo Nation, located in Arizona and New Mexico in the southwestern United States. The Navajo language belongs to the Southern, or Apachean, branch of the Athabaskan language family. Athabaskan languages are closely related by their shared morphological structure; these languages have a productive and extensive inflectional morphology. While many other languages, like English, have benefited from decades of research on their sound and speech systems, instrumental analyses of indigenous languages are relatively rare. There is a great deal of work to do before a chapter on the acoustics of Navajo comparable to the standard acoustic description of English can be produced. The goal of this project is to provide a baseline description of the phonetic structure of Navajo, as it is spoken on the Navajo reservation today, to provide a foundation for further work on the language.
*The physical copy is also available via NYU Libraries*

Based on nineteen years of field work with speakers of the Mississippi and Oklahoma dialects and more than 150 years of written Choctaw material, A Choctaw Reference Grammar contains the most complete description to date of the morphology of the language as well as a thorough treatment of phrase structure, word order, case marking, and complementation. The Choctaw tribe was divided into Oklahoma and Mississippi groups during the Indian Removal of the 1830s. Today the majority of fluent speakers among the Oklahoma Choctaws are more than forty years old, and few children speak the language. Although more children among the Mississippi Choctaws learn the language, the number is declining. Because language is vital to preserving the Choctaws' way of life and both dialects of Choctaw are endangered, careful documentation of the grammatical structure of the language is critically important.
*The physical copy is also available via NYU Libraries*