This is a project to complete a dictionary of Chickasaw, a language spoken in south central Oklahoma. Together with Choctaw, which is spoken in Oklahoma and Mississippi, Chickasaw constitutes one of the four divisions of the Muskogean language family, which is one of the major families of North American Indian languages. A dictionary of the language is important both for the remaining speakers of Chickasaw and for linguists attempting to piece together from surviving fragments of American Indian languages an understanding of how these languages were related to each other and their geographical distribution in the New World prior to the disruptions and relocations attendant on non-Indian population expansion into the areas inhabited by indigenous peoples.
