Challenges in endangered language lexicography

Résumé En

When it comes to endangered minority languages, lexicography is faced with specific limits and challenges. Based on our field lexicography experience and on the writing of a Palikur (Arawakan, French Guyana) dictionary, this paper aims to present some of the shortcomings of dictionary production, and what should and could be done to address the specific challenges which have to be met. First of all, we shall discuss several frequent limits (of) small language dictionaries, namely: i) the absence/scarcity of available corpora; ii) the use of an onomasiological approach for word collection, through a kind of enlarged Swadesh list methodology; iii) the consequent reduction of dictionaries to mere lexical lists; iv) the consequent risk of minoring the lexical specificities of a language by using pre-determinate lists of things or notions to be named. Secondly, we shall advocate for an approach to field lexicography centred on the collection of the most rapidly vanishing parts of the vocabulary, and insist on the strategies which can be used in order to do so, defending the necessity to overcome the lexicographer’s absence of expertise in many fields of knowledge by promoting multidisciplinary field work. This issue will be illustrated by the example of the “biolexicon” (plants, insects, etc.) in Palikur. Finally, we shall tackle word translation issues, and the risk to produce either hyperonymic lexicographical descriptions or precise (but unusable for the reader) equivalents. We shall show how these constraints should lead to a semi-encyclopaedic lexicographical approach.