State-of-the-art on monolingual lexicography for Basque (Basque)

Abstract

In this article, we give an overview of the evolution of Basque lexicography to the present, pointing out its main achievements and shortcomings, as well as its challenges for the future. Basque lexicography has a relatively short history, but a considerable amount of resources have been produced in the last 50 years, since the standardisation process began. After years of lexicographic work by different groups and publishers, a remarkable achievement is the Dictionary of the Academy (Euskaltzaindiaren Hiztegia), a prescriptive updated dictionary recently published and based on historical and contemporary corpora. Although the number of monolingual products is noticeably increasing in the last years, Basque dictionary making has been specially productive for bilingual purposes, due probably to the sociolinguistic status of the language. On the other hand, specialized lexicography and terminology have been very active from the beginning of the standadisartion process. Since the beginning of the XXI. century, use of corpora has known an increasing impulse. Many Basque dictionaries are freely available on the Internet.