In 1913 Jacob Piatt Dunn, president of the Public Library Commission of Indiana and secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, wrote to Newberry Library trustee Edward Ayer requesting funds to help launch a new Society for the Preservation of Indian Languages. The Society’s first project would be a translation of Jesuit Father Jean-Baptiste Le Boulanger’s eighteenth-century Peoria-French dictionary into modern Miami and English. Dunn did not find financial backers for his proposed society, but the five-volume Miami dictionary he envisioned was eventually published in 1938, after his death, by the Indiana Historical Society.
Recently, in 2002, the linguist Carl Masthay published his edition of a Kaskaskia Illinois-French dictionary that had previously existed only in a 580-page manuscript dating from the eighteenth century. Although Kaskaskia Illinois, an Algonquian dialect, is now extinct, the dictionary offers a glimpse into the cultural world encountered by French-Canadians when they first arrived in the Illinois Country.
 Letters, February 7, 1913, pg.1_o2.jpg){kind=link}
,%20Kaskaskia%20Illinois-to-French%20dictionary,%20pg.532_o2.jpg){kind=link}