Community-centred dictionary-making in practice: Survey findings toward a framework of relational lexicography

Abstract

In this paper, we advance relational lexicography as a framework for understanding contemporary community-centred dictionary work for Indigenous, endangered, and minoritized languages. Reviewing the results of a global survey of 144 practitioners working across 126 languages, we demonstrate that dictionary-making is increasingly collaborative, ethical and reflexive, and embedded in wider networks of language revitalization, education, archives, and place-based knowledge. The responses show that dictionaries are no longer understood primarily as static reference products, but as dynamic social processes shaped by relationships among speakers, learners, researchers, dialects, technologies, and communities. These findings are situated within broader shifts from colonial and authoritative models of lexicography toward critical, decolonial, and participatory approaches. We argue, therefore, that relational lexicography provides a useful conceptual framework for conceptualizing dictionary-making as a socially situated, culturally accountable, and future-oriented practice, while exploring its practical, ethical, institutional, and theoretical implications for contemporary language documentation and revitalization in community-centred and collaborative lexicographic projects worldwide today.