ABSTRACT The project involves the continuation of work already in progress on producing a basic description of the Kutenai language, an American Indian language of the Pacific Northwest which is not closely related to any other language. The basic goal is to produce two volumes, one a coleection of texts in the language, the other an analytic dictionary. Lawrence Morgan recently completed a dissertation that provides a grammatical description of the language. The two volumes proposed, together with Morgan's dissertation, will provide a well-rounded description of the language. The dissertation is primarily descriptive and makes the facts of Kutenai grammar available to linguists of all theoretical persuasions. The project will involve transcribing a number of the texts that already exist on tape, entering them onto computer, and analyzing them. There are also some existing texts that have only been transcribed, and others that have been transcribed and entered onto computer but which need to be analyzed. The dictionary will serve as a glossary for the volume of texts and for the dissertation. Field work will be undertaken and the project will interface with local community-based language projects.
