Lexicography in the French Caribbean: An Assessment of Future Opportunities

Page 619-627
Author Jason F. Siegel
Title Lexicography in the French Caribbean: An Assessment of Future Opportunities
Abstract While lexicography in the Hispanophone Caribbean has flourished, and to a lesser extent in the territories of the Caribbean whose official language is English, dictionaries of the French-official Caribbean (except Haiti) have been quite limited. But for the rest of the French-official Caribbean, there remains much work to do. In this paper, I assess the state of lexicography in the French-official Caribbean, as well as the possibilities for future work. There are six principal areas of lexicographic documentation to be developed. The first, most urgent task is the documentation of the endangered St Barth French. The next priority is multilingual lexicography for the Caribbean region. The third priority is multilingual lexicography of French Guiana, home to endangered Amerindian, Creole and immigrant languages. Fourth, there is a largely pristine area of lexicographic work for the English varieties of the French Caribbean. The fifth area of work to be developed is monolingual lexicography of French-based Creoles. Lastly, there is exploratory work to be done on the signed language varieties of the French-official Caribbean. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role that the Richard and Jeannette Allsopp Centre for Caribbean Lexicography can play in the development of these areas.
Session LEXICOGRAPHY OF LESSER USED LANGUAGES
Keywords minority languages, bilingual lexicography, French Caribbean
BibTex
@InProceedings{ELX2018-050,
author={Jason F. Siegel},
title={Lexicography in the French Caribbean: An Assessment of Future Opportunities},
pages={619-627},
booktitle={Proceedings of the XVIII EURALEX International Congress: Lexicography in Global Contexts},
year={2018},
month={jul},
date={17-21},
address={Ljubljana, Slovenia},
editor={Jaka Čibej, Vojko Gorjanc, Iztok Kosem, Simon Krek},
publisher={Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts},
isbn={978-961-06-0097-8}, }
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