The International year of Indigenous Languages will come to a close on 17th December, 2019. Jesuit commitment to Indigenous cultures, to their languages in languages in particular, is historically known since the Paraguay Reductions. In the early seventeenth century, Jesuit Fr. Antonio Ruiz De Montoya compiled three volumes of the grammar and vocabulary of the Guarani Language of the Amazonian Indians; in the late seventeenth century, Fr. Fremin’s work on Mohawk verb conjugations became an essential reference for the Mohawks (a North American tribe); Fr. Hoffman’s legendary fifteen volumes of ‘The Encyclopedia Mundarica’ in eastern India, and the tribal grammars in Gamit, Dangi, Vasavi and Chodhari by Fr. Raymund Chauhan in recent years are all just a glimpse of the Jesuit legacy of erudite scholarship in indigenous languages.
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