John Lewandowski, THE CANADIAN PRESS

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UNDATED - The irony has never been lost on Imelda Perley.

The only time she would usually hear fluent Maliseet, the language with which she grew up on New Brunswick's Tobique reserve, was during funerals.

"It's almost as if it was a sign from the ancestors that if this is the only place that we're going to be using our language and people are dying, then our language is also dying," says Perley, who along with her husband David, teaches at the Mi'kmaq-Maliseet Institute at the University of New Brunswick.

Perley 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.

The entries in the hardcover book, which weighs more than three kilograms, are enhanced with example sentences from everyday conversations and from oral tradition.

Leavitt's academic interest - he is not native - goes back to the 1970s when he was helping with bilingual curriculum development in Maine's Indian Township, a Passamaquoddy community.

"The director of the program, Wayne Newell, who was Passamaquoddy, conceived of the idea of a dictionary. He set up the format and made up the first compilation, about 3,000 words, between 1976 and 1979," he says.

Leavitt says both he and Francis, who is now 92, had been contributing to the project but eventually took it over in the early 1980s. They were able to utilize government grants and hire Margaret Apt, a community research co-ordinator, to help compile stories and words.

"We expanded the collection of words very modestly and edited it and prepared the dictionary, a manuscript at the time, for publication," he says. "We took the collection and put it on the mainframe computer at UNB and were able to generate an English side for the dictionary."

Leavitt, who was director of the Mi'kmaq-Maliseet Institute for 14 years, hopes the book will become more than a resource and inspire young people to take up where their elders left off.

"I'd like to see some sort of historical continuity, which is what's really lost when people stop speaking their language."

The book has already been launched at events in New Brunswick Maliseet communities, the University of Maine at Orono, and will be feted soon at UNB.

Perley says the release has generated a great deal of interest and excitement, especially among the elderly whose children and grandchildren know next to nothing of their linguistic history.

She ran into an elderly woman over the holidays and offered her traditional Maliseet well wishes for the New Year.

"The words in Maliseet are actually a request for forgiveness for all the past wrongs you may have done to the person you are greeting so that you may begin anew," she says.

"The woman I was greeting got quite emotional because she had not heard that greeting spoken in Maliseet in such a long time."

Perley sees the dictionary as another step toward realizing a long-held hope for the reclamation of her culture and the lessons she learned at a very young age.

She recalls telephoning her grandmother from a relative's home in New York state, where she'd gone to further her education.

"I remember telling her, 'I learned a new word today. It's really kind of nice.' I think the word was reiterate," Perley says.

"Grandmother said to me, 'That's a nice word but never forget your first language because it is who you are. You are not English. You are Maliseet."'

The Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary, which sells for $55, is published by Goose Lane Editions of Fredericton and the University of Maine at Orono Press.

It's available at Goose Lane Online, Chapters and several independent bookstores in New Brunswick.