Learner Features in a New Corpus-based Swahili Dictionary

Abstract

As far as traditionally published Swahili language dictionaries are concerned, throughout the long history of Swahili lexicography, most new dictionaries were based on their predecessors. Thus far the only innovative traditionally printed corpus-based dictionary has been published by Finnish scholars (Abdulla et al. 2002). This dictionary takes advantage of the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili (HCS 2004) and was an inspiration for the new Swahili–Polish dictionary project described in this paper. The Swahili–Polish language pair, which without doubt can be called less resourced, does not have many lexicographical antecedents on which a new dictionary could be based. Therefore, the new dictionary relies on data from the Swahili corpus.In this paper, we present a new, corpus-based Swahili–Polish dictionary that has been published online and printed. The paper introduces the resources used to build the dictionary, its learner-oriented features and grammatical assumptions, with a focus on the idea of the visualisation of derivational hierarchies.