The lexicography of indigenous languages in Australia and the Pacific
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Date
2015
Source Title
International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography
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Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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School of Languages and Linguistics
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Reference Work
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Thieberger, N. (2015). The lexicography of indigenous languages in Australia and the Pacific. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
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Open Access
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Abstract
The Australia and Pacific region is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s languages. Wordlists of a few of these languages date back to the first European explorers, while detailed dictionaries have been prepared for somewhere less than 5 % of them. Where an indigenous language is the official language of a country of this region it is more likely to have a dictionary and ongoing administrative support for lexicographic work, and, in a few cases, a corpus from which terms can be sourced. For most indigenous languages dictionaries are prepared in the course of language documentation efforts by researchers from outside of the speech community, using modern lexicographic database tools and resulting in structured lexicons. As a result, it is possible to produce various output formats of these dictionaries, including print-on-demand, multimodal webpages, and mobile devices as increasingly popular methods of delivery. A major use of these dictionaries can be to support vernacular language programs in schools. This region was a test bed for computational bilingual lexicography, and is home to the two largest comparative lexical databases of indigenous languages.