Biloxi-English Dictionary with English-Biloxi Index

Abstract

Biloxi (ISO 639-3: bll) is a dormant Siouan language. The only known resource available on the language has been /A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages/ (1912). The first linguist to document Biloxi in Louisiana was Albert Gatschet in 1886, who discovered that Biloxi was actually Siouan, not Muskogean as previously thought. The Reverend James O. Dorsey further documented the language in Louisiana in 1892-93. His dictionary, also incorporating some of Gatschet's previous work, was posthumously edited and published by the linguist John Swanton in 1912. The revised dictionary here contains most of the original Dorsey-Swanton data augmented with new entries (from Gatschet's unpublished field notes and from Haas's 1968 article, "The Last Words of Biloxi"). The current dictionary also regularizes the modified Americanist orthography. It contains 2,138 entries and includes my etymological analyses and notations, an English index, comparative data from Siouan and other languages, example sentences, cross-referencing of entries, cultural information, a brief grammatical sketch, as well as appendices on, for example, affixes, flora and fauna, medicinal plants, and human body parts.