An Oneida tribal elder and a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor have teamed up to create an online database of Oneida language resources, available at http://www.uwgb.edu/oneida/ .

The language site has several different tools available. There’s a background to the Oneida language. There’s a downloadable Oneida grammar, which is available in about a dozen different files or one large 26MB download. (The downloads are PDF files with include sound files. Click on the bold Oneida words to hear them spoken.)

On the site there’s a searchable English to Oneida dictionary (Oneida to English will be available at some point.) You can do a word search or a phrase search. I did a search for tree and got 25 results, ranging from the word tree to “beech tree with face in it” to “tree noise in winter” to “hang a tree up on another tree”. If you click on the Oneida word, you’re supposed to be able to hear it, but alas the whole thing is triggered through a Java applet and I had trouble getting it to work in Firefox.

The site’s clearly under development; the dictionary is nowhere near complete and there’s a “sample texts” page that isn’t functional yet. But the dictionary and downloadable grammars are well worth browsing if you’re at all interested in languages or Native American cultures.