Northern Paiute-Bannock Dictionary

This dictionary—a monumental achievement that has been decades in the making—is based on the extensive fieldwork of Sven Liljeblad, supplemented by Catherine Fowler’s and Harold Abel’s work. Liljeblad is widely regarded as the foremost Northern Paiute fieldworker, largely due to his work with some of the oldest and most fluent speakers. The 40,000-odd slip files that Liljebald gathered over a period of nearly 50 years served as the major source for this dictionary. The files represent data from eight of the seventeen communities of Northern Paiute speakers, representing all four dialects from over seventy native speakers.

Entries include the term, a phonetic transcription into IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), community code and consultant, form class or part of speech, an English definition, an example of the word used in a sentence as well as its translation into English, the term’s semantic field, the source of the entry, the various dialectal forms of the term, and cross-reference information. A dictionary such as this is all the more essential today since fewer children are learning the language and it is used less and less in native communities. The vast amount of detail provided for each entry makes this a valuable resource for linguists, native speakers, and those wishing to learn and preserve the Northern Paiute and Bannock languages.