A Susquehannock, from John Smith's Generall Historie (1624).

Main Features
 

The American Language Reprint (ALR) series aims to compile the various word-lists, vocabularies and phrase books which were collected in the early years of North American settlement. The series begins with the languages and dialects of the Eastern Woodlands, with a primary emphasis on the Eastern Algonquian and Iroquoian families. We hope to progressively extend the geographical scope of the project to form a comprehensive linguistic record of native North America prior to the advent of modern linguistics.

Each ALR volume takes an original word-list and alphabetizes the words in two sections, from the native language to English and vice-versa. The original orthographies are preserved exactly as they occur, complete with all diacritics and special characters used by the original authors. Some of these vocabularies have been edited and annotated by some of the most prominent linguists of the last two centuries: Daniel Brinton, J. Dyneley Prince, and others.

We are also currently designing utilities to make this linguistic database more accessible to scholarly analysis. Our new interactive ALR search form allows full web searching of all the data compiled in the series. Search for native equivalents to English words, and view their geographical and historical distributions.

Supplemental Information
 

Web Links of Interest
 

Last Modified: 3/12/2001