General Lexicography in Europe

On the basis of several surveys of experts, centres and projects in lexicography, and against the author's own experience of metalexicography, the paper traces the recent progress of academic lexicography, especially in Europe. Particular attention is paid to 'dictionary research' in four of its divisions. One special concern is the professionalisation of the discipline in terms of conferences, publications and training initiatives.


Introduction
State-of-the-art surveys are as quickly (out)dated as they are initially useful, but to attempt them on a continental scale seems like the ultimate folly.Nevertheless, I am going to risk some generalisations about the European dictionary front in the hope that shared information is better than (merely) filed information.
Against the background of a survey of linguistics in Europe which I was asked to undertake over 20 years ago (Hartmann 1972) and a number of other fact-finding ventures since then (EURALEX congresses, d. Hartmann 1984;Exeter D.R.C. bibliographical database and Who's Who directory;ERASMUS Consortium, d. Hartmann 1992a), I sent out a questionnaire to all my main contacts to gather data for a lecture which I had originally intended for the 25th anniversary meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) in 1991, but could not actually deliver until the inaugural conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) later that year.I asked such questions as "What would you estimate as the total number of dictionaries published since 1965", "What are the main dictionary types, in order of importance'?", and "Can you guess at the number of full-time lexicographers (in relation to the tOtal population)?"(The questionnaire, completed by myself for the U.K., is reproduced in the Appendix.I gratefully acknowledge the help received by respondents).The replies I received were relatively incomplete, especially with respect to Eastern Europe where po1itical changes have been momentous since 1991, but I relate them here in the context of other information I have in my files.

Recent history
Franz Josef Hausmann (1989) has remarked that "meta lexicographical reflection is as old as lexicography itself' and cited the example of Paolo Beni and his critical review Anti-Crusca of 1612.Hausmann also has helpful things to say about the recent history of academic lexicography.For the period after World War II, he presents evidence for regarding the years between 1960 and 1970 as an important turning point, instanced by the pioneering conference at Bloomington, Indiana (1960) and the publication of Ladislav Zgusta's Manual of Lexicography (1971).
-I find it intriguing that three other metalexicographers working in Europe have reached different conclusions about the start of contemporary lexicography, in their respective contributions to the International Encyclopedia of Lexicography, WorterbUcher/Dictionaries/Dictionnaires.Robert IIson, in Article 199, calls 1968 a "momentous year" in British lexicography; Alain Rey, in Article 186, mentions several cases of a "reawakening" French lexicographic spirit in the period from 1950 to 1985; Herbert Ernst Wiegand, in Article 206, states that for the post-war beginning of German lexicography, 1945 is "too early" and 1960 is "too late".What this suggests is that it would be unrealistic to assume a uniform ra~ of progress in European lexicography, at least in the post-war years to about)970.
Since the early 1970's it may be possible to stipulate a convergence of developments, due to a number of economic, sociological, educational and technological influences.There was economic prosperity, at least in Western Europe, which brought increased social mobility, more educational opportunities, better language teaching provision and more linguistic research at all levels, and the computer promised relief from mental drudgery.In lexicography, this produced new markets, new interests, new ideas, new investment.As we moved into the eighties, time seemed ripe for a boom.
If I was to highlight a single year, I wbuld choose 1983, ten years ago, when a number of significant conferences were held at Newark (Delaware), Smolen ice (Slovakia), Novi Sad (Yugoslavia), Augsburg and Aachen (Germany), and of course Exeter (U.K.) where the European Association for Lexi-cography (EVRALEX) was founded, when the ambitious projects of the international encyclopedia WorterbiicherlDictionaries/Dictionnilires (3 volumes edited by Hausmann/Reichmann/Wiegand/Zgusta) and the double series of monographs (48 volumes published) and yearbooks (7 volumes published) under the general title Lexicographica were conceived, and when the European Science Foundation survey of lexicographical projects (Cignoni et al. 1983) was published.
Lexicography in a European context I have already hinted at the difficulties of trying to build up a complete picture of the dictionary scene in Europe.One reason is that •there have been few precedents for such surveys.The ESF survey mentioned above was limited to 114 scholarly dictionary projects in Western Europe, and Bernard Quemada's (1972) essay for the Current Trends in Linguistics series concentrated primarily on historical dictionaries, largely in Romance languages.
A second reason for the lack of information is the tension that still exists between academic lexicography and commercial dictionary production, with academics primarily interested in theoretical principles and dictionary publishers watching out tor market opportunities.In any case, most projects tend to operate within the confines of a particular dictionary tradition linked to the language, history and institutions of a country.
The third reason is that there are only a few centres, associations and periodicals through which projects and progress can be reported (the International Journal of Lexicography, which includes the EURALEX Newsletter, only started 5 years ago).Conferences have an important role to play in this respect, but as I have pointed out in one of my papers (Hartmann 1990a), we have a long way to go until the artificial barriers between universities, publishers and academies can be broken down.
For the purpose of presenting the data in this paper, I have divided them into four parts, (a) the three leading countries, (b) the rest of the European Community, (c).thecountries outside the EC west of the former 'iron curtain ', and (d) the countries of Eastern Europe ..

ilLes trois paysages"
There are some good reasons for singling out the three largest countries of Europe in terms of population size (apart from Italy) for special treatment: Germany, France and the United Kingdom have long and distinguished lexicographical traditions, they are very productive both quantitatively and qualitatively, and many of the theoretical and practical innovations in recent years have come from them.That is why Hausmann (1985) speaks of "trois Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2011.)http://lexikos.journals.ac.za paysages", although he also characterises some of their differences: he praises the relatively well-developed "dictionary cu.Iture" in France, describes the British approach to "learners' dictionaries", and points out some inherent limitations of German lexicography.
, There are established traditions and standards for the lexicography of the major languages, German, French and English, with 77,51 and 55 million native speakers respectively.The societies are effectively monoglot (admittedly with remarkable dialect differentiation), but there are also linguistic minorities of varying size and stability, e.g.Turkish and Sorbian in Germany, Arabic and Breton in France, and Urdu and Welsh in the United Kingdom.
We find comprehensive ranges of dictionary products, in terms of numbersand types.Wiegand has given the following estimates for Germany in the period since about 1965:, 2,000 technical-terminological dictionaries, 100 dialect dictionaries, 80 spelling dictionaries 70 general-explanatory dictionaries, 30 dictionaries of foreign words, 11 historical-etymological dictionaries.
No figures are available for bilingual dictionaries, which I guess to be in the region of several hundred.Dictionary production in France and the United Kingdom appears to be more limited, and the distribution by tYpes may be different, with (foreign) learners' dictionaries forming an important genre in Britain (d. Hartmann 1992b).
The. three countries can boast strong publishing houses capable of delivering the goods, e.g.Duden and Langenscheidt in Germany, Le Robert and Larousse in France, Oxford and Collins in Britain.There are also sizeable bodies of working lexicographers, about 100 full-time in Germany and Britain and maybe fewer in France.Many of these have become members of EURALEX, and some regularly attend conferences in their own countries and elsewhere (some famous names from Germany: Drosdowski, Reichmann, Neubert; from France: Rey, Dubois, Gorey; and from the U.K.: see Appendix).
. There are research centres, at least in embryo (particularly at Erlangen, Lille and Exeter), which may also exert a pos~tive effect on the development of training (see below).Lexicography is occasionally linked to the study of the mother tongue (Institut fUr deutsche Sprache~ Mannheim, Institut de la langue fran«;aise, Nancy) or to Computational Linguistics (Bonn, Stuttgart, Birmingham).
Lest I give the impression that all is rosy in the European dictionary garden, I should frankly admit that there are a number of desiderata (d.Hartmann 1986a) that have not yet been fulfilled even in the three leading countries: Complete, annotated lists of published dictionaries, by language, by information category, and by user group do not exist, and reliable production or sales statistics for the dictionary publishing industry are sadly lacking (for a bibliography of dictionary bibliographies, d.Cop 1990), although according to one market report reference books now constitute over 15 % of all books produced.Lists of ongoing dictionary projects, dictionary publishers and active lexicographers are not available, except for the rudimentary Who's Whb directory database being assembled at Exeter.Job descriptions of ~equired professional skills and accounts of on-thejob training schemes are hard to come by; one promising development is the elaboration of 'national vocational qualifications' for the (British) publishing industry, although not with the full backing of all dictionary publishers.A directory of relevant academic courses does not exist, although Wiegand (1989) gives a list of some of these involving aspects of dictionary research in German universities, and there are brochures about the European postgraduate Diploma in Lexicography (see below).It would be useful, too, to have a list of research topics treated at such centres as well as a catalogue of unpublished theses and dissertations.
[See also the relevant articles dealing with the monolingual and interlingual lexicography of German, French, English etc. in Hausmann et al. (1989-91).] The rest of the EC The remaining, currently 9, countries of the European Community include the three Benelux countries, Denmark, the Irish Republic, and the four southern countries Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, with two large language communities in terms of numbers of speakers (30 million for Italian and over 28 million for Spanish if non-standard dialects/languages like Lombardian, Sicilian, Catalan and Galician are counted separately), and the rest with fewer than -10 million each.
Dictionary production is much more limited in these countries (estimates for published dictionaries since 1965 include 500 for Italy, 200 for Denmark, 100 each for Spain and the Netherlands), as is the number of active lexicographers (one of the highest figures relative to population size, i.e. 50/5 million, is claimed for Denmark, which has recently set up a professional association, Copenhagen having also hosted a series of 6 international Symposia since 1982).
Periodicals Courses on aspects of lexicography are offered in Belgium (Universities of Liege and Gent, and at the M. Haps Terminology Institute at Brussels), Denmark (Arhus Business School has created a chair in Lexicography), and the Netherlands (INL at Leiden and Free University at Amsterdam).Some dictionary research is pursued at the above centres as well as in Ireland (Dublin), Italy (Pisa), Spain (Malaga, Barcelona, and Cordoba) and Greece (Thessaloniki).Because of the relative size and status of these languages vis-a.-vis the 'big' European languages (German, French and English, e.g. as subjects taught in schools and universities, dictionaries for ~ranslation and other interlingual purposes are in greater demand here than in the relatively monoglot communities of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. [See also the relevant articles dealing with the monolingual and interlinguallexicography of Danish, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish etc. in  Hausmann et a1.(1989-91) and the EURALEX Congress proceedings (esp.Biblograf 1992).]

Non-EC 'Western' Europe
The next group, all except one in the European Free Trade Area and potential candidates for EC membership, include four Nordic and two Central European countries and one on the edge of the Middle East and Asia, a heterogeneous entity with little in common lexicographically, ranging from a prosperous island of 200,000 speakers of a single language to a relatively poor country with a population of over 50 million.I will venture only a few remarks about the lexicographic situation in these seven countries based on questionnaire returns.
In Norway, where the political and linguistic history was tied to that of Denmark for many centuries, the double standards of the literary bokmdl and the colloquial Nynorsk have led to a high degree of language awareness, some deliberate language planning, and an active lexicographic community producing a wide range of bilingual-translation dictionaries, monolingual-spelling dictionaries, and normative-technical dictionaries.Courses are taught at Oslo University whose lexicographic centre under Dag Gundersen has also hosted the first conference of the new Nordic Lexicographic Association.Iceland, the smallest country of Northern Europe, boasts a highly sophisticated literary tradition and good lexicographic output.Given the ratio of lexicographers per total.populationand the membership of its lexicographic society, Iceland outclasses the larger countries by a factor of 100.
Sweden has a number of interesting dictionary projects linked to dialectology, computational linguistics and the teaching of Swedish to immigrants (e.g. at Goteborg and Lund), supported by the Swedish Academy.There is at least one textbook (Svensen 1987) used all over Scandinavia.
As in other countries of this group, bilingual dictionaries play an important role in Finland.However, relative to the number of Finnish native speakers (less than 5 million), lexicography is a lively activity, often in conjunction with language planning, translation and terminology work.
In the centre of Europe, the neutral countries Switzerland and Austria, with just under and over 7 million inhabitants, respectively, are concerned with documenting the various, mainly German, dialects (el.Lurati and Stricker  1982); there is also some lexicographic interest at translator training and terminology centres (e.g.Infoterm in Vienna).
[See also the relevant articles dealing with the monolingual and interlingual lexicography of the Nordic Germanic languages, of Finnish, and Turkish (on which no other literature is available to me) etc. in Hausmann et al. (1989-91), and the EURALEX Congress proceedings (esp.Snell-Hornby 1988 andTommola et al. 1992).]

Non-EC 'Eastern' Europe
The last group in my survey are the countries of Eastern Europe, a region where we have seen many and rapid changes during the last few years.It is extremely difficult to keep up-to-date with developments, espeCially as far as the multiplying states of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are concerned, since lexicographic information is rarely available and contacts are still limited.
Considering their relative population sizes (which range from over 150 million for Russia, through over 37 million for Poland and 20 million for Romania, to less than 3 million for Albania and under 2 million each for the Baltic States) and their weak economic superstructure, lexicographic research .and production has a good record.
The Academies of Science (some of which are under review, or have been abolished recently) have promoted a long line of scholarly dictionary projects: historical dictionaries, etymolOgical dictionaries,• dialect dictionaries, idiom dictionaries and, just as important here as in the West, bilingual dictionaries for Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2011.)http://lexikos.journals.ac.za translation and foreign language learning.For Russia, one 'estimate for the number of dictionaries published since 1965 is 2,000.

Dictionary research in Europe today
In this section I would like to widen the scope a little and discuss the status of lexicography in terms of dictionary making, dictionary research and professional training.There has indeed been a lively debate in the last ten years, especially in the context of EURALEX Congresses, as to whether lexicography has developed into a respectable field that deserves the title 'academic discipline', and what could or should be done to bridge the gulf between practical and theoretical lexicography.
The publication of WorterbUcher/Dictionaries/Dictionnaires.An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography (Hausmann et a1. 1989-91) marks this move in the direction of a 'scientific activity'.To quote from Rufus Gouws's detailed review (1992: 290), It is a prime example of the combination and interaction of a variety of methodological, didactic, linguistic and metalexicographic principles, and their practical application.It represents the state 'of the art of reference works by being encyclopedia, textbook, comprehensive bibliography and authoritative container of information.
I usually distinguish four main aspects or branches of metalexicography or dictionary 'research: dictionary history, dictionary typology, dictionary criticism, and dictionary use, and I shall briefly illustrate them in the context of Europe.
. As I have already mentioned, the lexicography of a country or language depends not only on the external history of:that country or language, but also on the internal cultural traditions that evolV:e in successive generations of dictionary making.Thanks to such authorities,as Gabriele Stein (1985) and Tom McArthur (1986), we now have an almost continuous account of the history of Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2011.)http://lexikos.journals.ac.zaEnglish lexicography.However, this is not a 'closed book': new knowledge comes to light all the t i m e .' , Thus, at a seminar on the subject of dictionary history (Hartmann 1986b), we heard Noel Osselton present evidence of a 16th-century dictionary compiler _ Rawlinson -whose unpublished dictionary preceded and surpassed that of Robert Cawdrey who is normally regarded as the founder of the monolingual English dictionary.There had been other English dictionaries well before that, of course, as part of the interlingual Latinate tradition of Medieval and Renaissance Europe.At the same meeting, Nawal El-Badry speculated whether the fact that in bilingual lexicography (of English and Arabie) the passive or 'decoding' dictionary arrived before the active or 'encoding' dictionary can be generalised into a lexicographic universal.' Another fascinating branch of dictionary history revealed at the Exeter Seminar was called 'lexicographic archaeology' by Robert Ilson: showing connections between genealogically xelated dictionaries, e.g.tracing a recent British and a not so recent 'American dictionary via the Century Dictionary right back to the Imperial Dictionary, in tum a British adaptation of Noah Webster's American Dictionary.This is the kind of detective work that has led another contributor, Fredric Dolezal, to claim that the story of the English dictionary may actually be the story of a single edited and re-edited text!Dictionary typology is concerned with the classification of the very different dictionary genres and profiles we find in various countries, periods, or cultures.The annual volumes which form one of the series of Lexicographica have attempted to highlight such dictionary types: the 'monolingual' dictionary in 1/1985, the 'bilingual' dictionary in 2/1986, the 'cultural' dietionary in 3/1987, the 'computer-assisted' dictionary in 4/1988, the 'LSP' dictionary in 5/1989, and the 'etymological' dictionary in 7/1991.The type of dictionary in which I have myself taken some interest is the so-called leamer's dictionary.Most people specialising in English will be familiar with its prototypes, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and the Collins COB UILD English Language Dictionary, and their minor imitators.There are comparable pedagogically oriented dictionaries for French on the market, but only one such monolingual dictionary has' been designed for foreign learners of German; while lexicographers working on other languages have only just begun to experiment with this genre.Meanwhile, tensions have developed vis-a.-vis the monolingual dictionary for native speakers, on the one hand, and the traditional bilingual dictionary for translators and foreign language learners, on the other.Combining features of both monolingual and interlingual lexicography, a compromise sub-type has emerged in, recent years, viz. the 'bilingualised leamer's dictionary', in which translation equivalents are provided for each sense of each headword, an approach that has also yielded interesting results in other, e.g.onomasiological, dictionary types.
Innovation may also come from another branch of dictionary research usually termed dictionary criticism, a relatively old field which has been bedevilled in the past by prejudice and arbitrary personal judgement.Several monographs in the Lexicographica Series Maior have not only shown, by detailed comparative text analysis, how idiosyncratic dictionary reviews can be, but also what might be done to work out more objective criteria for the evaluation and assessment of lexicographic output (d.Hernandez 1989 for Spanish, Ripfel1989 for German, Jehle 1990 for English and French). .
Dictionary use is the fourth branch of dictionary research or metalexicog-raphy~ This allows us to find out by means of various empirical methods (interviews, tests, questionnaires, film and protocol analysis) what Dictionary users actually do in the process of consulting the information presented in the dictionary.\ The idea is •not to guess what a particular reference work might be used for by its anonymous users, but to determine categorically for which tasks it has been found to be either beneficial or unsatisfactory.There have been quite a number of such interdisciplinary observational studies of different users of different dictionary types in different situational contexts, not just in Europe (d.Hartmann 1989 for a review of the literature).Associated with the user perspective is the question of how dictionary users acquire the necessary reference skills, what these consist of, and how they can be taught deliberately.Some of the dictionary 'workbooks' now available for this purpose have been critically compared by a former M.A. student at Exeter (Stark 1990).
There are other topics apart from these four more widely publicised subjects of dictionary research.Some of these are covered in other volumes of the Lexicographica Series Maior' and in articles contributed to the International Encyclopedia, notably interlingual lexicography, pedagogical lexicography, technical lexicography, and computatioilal lexicography, all areas where there has been much progress in Europe.One particular area that does not yet appear to have an overall name, except perhaps for the concepts of 'macrostructure' and 'microstructure', covers the component structures 'of the dictionary, their interrelations, and the way they are put together in the successive stages of the lexicographic process. 1 can foresee, even predict, massive input and subsequent success in this specialised subject, but a lot will depend on the healthy interaction of theory and practice.

Professional training
Finally, a topic into wh.ich 1 have invested quite a lot of time during the last few years: how' to raise standards by providing ~ore and better training.We need to increase the public's awareness of lexicographic issues, and we need to teach dictionary users appropriate reference skills ai:td how to improve them.Above all, we need to give the next generation of lexicographers a chance to do better, Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2011.)http://lexikos.journals.ac.za by looking at what has gone before (dictionary history), by appreciating the wide choice of genres available (dictionary typology), by elaborating criteria of assessing them (dictionary criticism), and by observing what goes on in the consultation process (dictionary use).At the same time, the practical side of dictionary making must not be ignored, in terms of field-work or recording (including text corpora), description or editing (including planning and resourcing), and presentation or publishing (including computer techniques).
For all these reasons I started in 1988 to negotiate with a number of representatives of dictionary research centres in various countries of Europe towards a training framework for lexicography, and with the help of an EC (ERASMUS) grant we managed t9 design a modular; :interdisciplinary, multisite postgraduate programme at Diploma and Master's level which is now running at Exeter and at the same time at Lille III University in France and at the Free University Amsterdam in the Netherlands.The course at Exeter comprises the following components: In addition, it includes a practical placement with a dictionary project and a dissertation as well as an optional ERASMUS exchange with students from Lille and Amsterdam.We are currently considering whether and how the course consortium could be extended to other centres in Europe.

Conclusion
My overall conclusion is that dictionary research is alive and well, and together with improved training facilities is likely to lead to further advances in dictionary making; although no single profile has yet emerged of the typical country, the typical dictionary, and the typical lexicographer in Europe.Quemada's statement (1972: 434) that "Lexicographic methodology has made great headway since the end of the last war" is even more valid today than two decades ago.
One caveat is perhaps in order as we reach the end of this continental conspectus.We should not be satisfied just with a knowledge about progress in Europe.A world perspective is now needed in lexicography just as in other spheres of human activity, and in this spirit I join those who have attempted surveys of other scenes (Zgusta 1980, Algeo 1989, Hartmann 1990b, Hausmann et al. 1989-91, Delbridge 1992) in hoping for much widened lexicographic horizons.
Principles and Practice of Dictionary Publishing, Computing in Lexicography, The Representation of Meaning in the Dictionary, Typology and Component Structures of Dictionaries, The User Perspective in Dictionary Research, Bilingual Lexicography, The Learner's Dictionary.
and other publications devoted tQ general lexicography are not so common in this group of countries (the Studi di lessicografia italiana are issued by the Accademia della Crusca in Florence; Marello 1989 is one of the few textbooks on bilingual lexicography; van Sterkenburg 1984 is a Dutch introduction to lexicography, Cabre and Lorente 1991 a bibliography of Catalan dictionaries, DANLEX Group 1987 a survey of computer applications to dictionary making).