Passamaquoddy-Maliseet dictionary

Natives, educators hail release of dictionaryPerley estimates that less than two per cent of the 5,000 Passamaquoddy- Maliseet people living in a handful of communities in New Brunswick, Maine and Quebec are fluent in their native tongue.

But her ongoing struggle to preserve and restore the language to common use has been given a major boost with the release of a Passamaquoddy-Maliseet dictionary.

Authored by David A. Francis, a former tribal governor from Maine, and Robert A. Leavitt, a former member of UNB's faculty of education, the book represents 30 years of collaboration between native speakers, educators and linguists.

Its more than 18,000 entries contain remarkable detail about the physical, spiritual, social and emotional environments of the Passamaquoddy and Maliseet peoples, who called most of the region home before the arrival of European settlers.