Euralex 2026: directions in lexicography in the global south (part 1)

At the recent Euralex (lexicography) conference in Vienna, I presented a paper called "Directions in lexicography in the Global South". You can read an extended abstract by downloading the book of abstracts from the Euralex website, but I thought I'd put together a slightly more accessible write-up aimed at a wider audience.

I'm going to split it across four posts. In this post, I'll give a bit of background and an overview, then I'll follow that with three posts looking at each of the three trends I talked about.

I was doing the session in my role with the AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA). For those of you who haven't heard me talk about ASHDRA before, the awards fund dictionary-related research projects in the area of ELT. They started in 2019 and I joined the panel in 2020.

Each year, we put out a call for proposals around early February. As a panel, we then review the applications that come in and select one or more research project to award funding to. The funding has ranged from £500 to £15,000 and the projects can last for either one or two years. The research must be related to dictionaries in some way and must have practical applications in English Language Teaching (as a second language). In line with the objectives of the Hornby Trust, we especially target research in/into low-resource contexts. That means a lot of our past projects have been in or for contexts in the Global South - thus the title of my paper. Although, we also fund research in under-resourced areas in the UK and elsewhere such as refugee education, ESOL, etc. and we don't exclude especially interesting or innovative research in other settings.

Since the awards started, we've gone through eight cycles and received 158 applications in total from 52 different countries and awarded funding to 18 research projects.

The global spread of ASHDRA applications

On the map, the orange dots represent 1-5 applications from that country. The larger dark green dots indicate 6-10 applications. And the two blue dots show our largest number of applicants have been based in India and the UK. I should say that many of the UK-based applicants propose research into contexts in Global South countries and often in collaboration with local researchers.

At one of our panel meetings last year, we were talking about the trends that have emerged from all the applications we've looked at so far and what they might say about the interests and needs in terms of dictionary resources in the kinds of settings and countries the awards focus on. That was the initial spark for the talk and sent me off looking back through our records of past applications and trying to classify them by theme.

I selected three main themes to talk about, namely:

• research into dictionary resources to support (sometimes highly) multilingual contexts
• resources aimed at learners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP)
• inclusive resources targeted at learners for whom traditional dictionaries are not accessible.

 

 

As you can see from the chart, all three groups account for a significant proportion of applications. Inclusive resources appear to be quite a small group, but as we'll see, this is a theme that actually covers quite a few projects that aren't immediately flagged as obviously 'inclusive' so is much more widespread as the stats here suggest. The remainder of the proposals cover a huge range of themes and types, including quite a large chunk that I chose not to focus on for this particular paper. Many proposals, including a number of successful ASHDRA projects, have been in the broad area of dictionary skills, either focusing on how learners are already using dictionaries or looking at ways to improve the teaching of dictionary skills. I didn't include these in this particular talk, which remember was for a lexicography conference, simply because they perhaps sit more in the ELT sphere than in nuts and bolts lexicography.

I should, of course, acknowledge at this point that the awards only cover a certain type of lexicographical research and interests, specifically with their focus on ELT, so they don't necessarily reflect the very many other areas of lexicography going on out there.

In my next post, I'll dive into a world of multi-layered linguistic patchworks and examples of dictionary resources designed to help learners and teachers to navigate them.