The Swedish Dialect Dictionary – a presentation

By November 17, 2016,
Page 897-902
Author Eva Thelin, Annika Karlholm
Title The Swedish Dialect Dictionary – a presentation
Abstract The most recent dictionary covering all dialects of Swedish, was published in1867 by Johan Ernst Rietz. Hence, the need for a modern dialect dictionary is considerable and in 2003 preparations for the Swedish Dialect Dictionary (Svenskt dialektlexikon or SDL) were initiated at the Department of Dialectology and Folklore Research in Uppsala. The SDL will be directed to the general public and the overall aim, apart from providing information about dialect words, is to stimulate people’s interest in dialects.
The SDL is to be published as a one-volume dictionary comprising app. 500 to 600 pages. It will be based on the dialect collections kept at the department, which comprise more than 7.3 million paper slips, each describing a single word from a single parish. The SDL will only include a small proportion of the dialect words in these collections and in the preparatory work, the key issue was therefore to establish inclusion policies. A very strict selection of words is essential and there was a need for clear guidelines in order to speed up the selection process and to prevent a purely subjective choice of words. Based on the presumed needs of our target audience, the most important aspects were found to be the degree of ‘dialectness’ and the geographical distribution of the words, the number of examples and the age of the source material.
Session Posters
Keywords Swedish dialects, word selection, geographical distribution
BibTex
@InProceedings{ELX12-088,
author = {Eva Thelin and Annika Karlholm},
title = {The Swedish Dialect Dictionary – a presentation},
pages = {897--902},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2012},
month = {aug},
date = {7-11},
address = {Oslo,Norway},
editor = {Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld and Julie Matilde Torjusen},
publisher = {Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo},
isbn = {978-82-303-2228-4},
}
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