Dine Bizad by F.G. Mitchell (1910)

Title page of Dine Bizad, by FG Mitchell.

Today I am announcing the online availability of Dine Bizad: a handbook for beginners in the study of the Navaho language by F.G. Mitchell (1910).

I have had my eye on this book for a couple of months now. This specific book is found in Brigham Young University’s Special Collections. I know I couldn’t check the book out, so I asked a librarian if it would be alright to take photos of the pages since it is in the public domain. The librarian ask what book I was interested in and suggested that he could probably get it scanned and uploaded to a digital archive in a week. So here it is.

I will warn all students of the Navajo language that this book is 102 years old. I strongly suggest as Mitchell does in the Introduction to go over the pronunciation guide first. The spelling is different from what we are accustomed to, but the pronunciation looked pretty accurate from what I could tell.

I really like that there is a verb conjugation listing. There are about 300 verbs that are conjugated in the first 90 pages. It provides conjugation for the first, second, and third person…not all tenses (modes) are included. Mitchell had this comment about the listing, “..conjugations given are partial only, being limited to those forms which are necessary for a beginner”.

After the verbs there is a general English-Navajo word list in alphabetical order. This is followed by classified lists such as Greetings, Body Parts, and Times & Seasons.

So have a look, the book is uploaded to Archive.org and is free to download in .pdf, epub, and Kindle formats.