Alabama Dictionaries

Alabama is a native American language spoken today primarily by members of the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation near Livingston, Texas. It belongs to the Muskogean language family which now also includes the languages Koasati (spoken by the Coushatta tribe), Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Mikasuki. Some of these languages are more closely related to each other than are others. For instance, Chickasaw/Choctaw, Creek/Seminole, and Alabama/Koasati have sometimes been described as pairs of dialects. Alabama and Koasati, however, are better considered as two separate languages; a speaker of Alabama who has not by chance learned to speak Koasati too would not be able to understand a fluent speaker of Koasati very well, and vice versa. The Dictionary of the Alabama Language is the first dictionary of the language of the Alabama Indians. It is a bilingual (Alabama-English ) dictionary intended as a resource for the speakers of Alabama them selves and for their descendants as a means of helping to preserve their cultural heritage. It is also intended to be used by language scholars and anyone with an interest in learning something about an American Indian language. The dictionary is view ed as a companion to two other works currently in preparation, a collection of texts transcribed and analyzed by Hardy and translated by Sylestine, and a detailed description of the grammar by Hardy. Since a collection of vocabulary is only a part of the language a complete record of the language awaits these additional works. The grammatical descriptions given in this dictionary are brief and limited to that necessary to use the dictionary.

The following is available in Amazon which has some good reviews.

Dictionary of the Alabama Language (Hardcover)
"Muskogean specialists and linguists in general will find it hard to overestimate the significance of this dictionary . . . [it] contains vast amounts of important data, well analyzed, well organized, and well presented." --anthony mattina, professor of linguistics, university of montana The Alabama language, a member of the Muskogean language family, is spoken today by the several hundred inhabitants of the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Polk County, Texas. This dictionary of Alabama was begun over fifty years ago by tribe member Cora Sylestine. She was aided after 1980 by linguists Heather K. Hardy and Timothy Montler, who completed work on the dictionary after her death. This state-of-the-art analytical dictionary contains over 8,000 entries of roots, stems, and compounds in the Alabama-English section. Each entry contains precise definitions, full grammatical analyses, agreement and other part-of-speech classifications, variant pronunciations, example sentences, and extensive cross-references to stem entries. The Alabama-English section is followed by a thorough English-Alabama finder list that functions as a full index to the definitions in the Alabama-English section.

Reviewer: Battise (USA)
This dictionary is crucial chronicle of the Alabama language. It took the author Sylestine, almost fifty years to complete (Actually completed after her death). The Alabama language is a part of the Muskogeon band of languages that include: Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Coushatta, and other tribes of the southeast. It is an essential part of my tribe's survival to preserve our culture, and our language is a crucial part in accomplishing this. The dictionary offers translations from Alabama to English( in the first half of the book) and English to Alabama ( in the second half). I recommend this book to all interested in Native languages, and those interested in the Muskogeon languages (for they are not in written form until recently). My recommendation comes from knowing Cora Sylestine (the author) for years, and also my grandmother is one of the contributing speakers credited in the book.

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