The Oneida today live primarily in three communities: Oneida-of-the-Thames near London, Ontario, the Oneida reservation near Green Bay, Wisconsin, and the Oneida reservation near Syracuse, New York. The original homeland of the Oneida was in New York; those who want to learn about the history of the Oneida, and their move to Ontario and Wisconsin, should consult Campisi and Hauptman (1988). It is estimated that there are presently about 160 speakers of Oneida in Ontario, and probably fewer than two dozen in Wisconsin. There are no fluent speakers in New York, although it is being taught in schools by teachers...

The orthography used in this dictionary is the orthography that is used by most teachers of Oneida in all three communities where Oneida is taught. The sounds represented by the letters are described in Table 1 on page 5. The vowels Λ and u are nasalized, and so English examples are given where the approximate equivalent sound is the English vowel plus the nasal consonant n or m. Certain sounds have a slightly different pronunciation depending on neighbouring sounds. For example, it often makes a difference whether the following sound is an obstruent (t k s h ?) or a...

The entries in the Oneida-English dictionary fall into four categories:

entries for bases

entries for affixes and clitics

entries for particles

entries for cross-referencing purposes

An example of each of these is given below, with a description of the information found in each one.

The most frequent type of base is a verb or noun base. A small number of bases fall into neither of these categories; they will be discussed in the Guide to Oneida-English Entries.

An example of an entry for a verb base is:

-atketskw- v.a. get up.katkétskwasI keep getting up,latkétskwashe gets up....

In the following sections we define what we mean bybaseand describe how the information in entries for bases is organized.

The structure of words in Oneida and other Iroquoian languages is notoriously complex. Notions which are expressed in other languages by independent words are often expressed in Iroquoian languages as part of a single word. Linguists who have studied these languages, beginning with Floyd Lounsbury inOneida Verb Morphology(1953), have found it useful to use the termsroot, base, andstemto identify certain units within words.

Perhaps the easiest way to review these terms is with...

The English-Oneida dictionary consists of entries that are alphabetized by English glosses. It has entries for all of the verb and noun bases given in the Oneida-English dictionary, as well as entries for most of the particles. The entries include as subentries all of the forms that are given as subentries in the Oneida-English dictionary, but without any technical information, such as the aspect class, or the identity of prepronominal prefixes and incorporated nouns.

The glosses that occur at the head of entries are generally the same glosses that appear in the Oneida-English entries after the category designation. In some...