The commission of the Institut de France was charged with offering a prize on linguistics, under the will of Count Volney. Formerly, this essay was thought to have been by Baron Nicolas Massias (1764-1848), who won the Volney prize in 1828. However, the note that the volume was shipped from New York precludes that.

Born in Königsberg, Prussia, in 1714, the Moravian missionary Johann Jacob Schmick studied theology as a young man and became acquainted with the teachings of the United Brethren as early as 1742, taking his first communion six years later. He was called to become a missionary in 1751, and was appointed to the Indian congregation at Gnadenhutten, Pa., ministering primarily to a congregation of Mahican converts who had settled there. Schmick taught reading and writing, and was particularly known for teaching singing and introducing the spinet and other instruments to the Indians. He continued in his missionary work almost to the time of his death in 1778. Schmick's Miscellanea linguae nationis Indicae Mahikan consists of two volumes (322pp.) of manuscript vocabulary and notes on the Mahican language recorded between about 1753 and 1767. It consists of words and phrases in Mahican, written phonologically, and translated into their German equivalents. The volumes have been edited, translated, and published by Carl Masthay as Schmick's Mahican Dictionary APS Memoir 197 (1991).

Theodor Schultz was a Moravian missionary in British Guiana at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Lokono ("Arawak") language manuscripts sent to the APS by him include both a grammatical treatise (organized upon the Latin model) ("Grammaticalische Sätze von der Aruwakkischen Sprache") and an extensive Lokono-German dictionary ("Aruwakkisch deutsches Wörterbuch, vermehrt 1803").

Beginning in the 1790s, the American Philosophical Society began to accumulate vocabularies and texts written in Native American languages, guided by Thomas Jefferson's idea of using comparative linguistics to reconstruct the histories of Indian peoples and discern their origins. The American Indian Vocabularies Collection was initially assembled by the Historical and Literary Committee of the APS for publication in 1816. They include information on seventeen North American languages and one each from the Caribbean and Central America, collected between 1784 and 1828. A number of individuals were invovled in recording the vocabularies, including Benjamin Hawkins, William Thornton, David Campbell, Daniel Smith, Constantine Volney, Constantine Rafinesque, William Vans Murray, John Heckewelder, Martin Duralde, Campanius Holm, and Jefferson himself. Most followed the standardized word set established by Jefferson.