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The dictionary of Welsh dialect 11/8/2003
Do you use words or phrases peculiar to a county of Wales? If so Cardiff University offers an opportunity to record them for posterity in the Welsh Dialect Dictionary, which is being prepared by Professor Peter Wynn Thomas of the University’s School of Welsh.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, over 200 collections of local Welsh words and phrases have been published. Many others are preserved in the Museum of Welsh Life and in postgraduate theses.
These collections are rich sources of dialect data but have received little attention from academics or laymen. Geiriadur Tafodieithol y Gymraeg (The Welsh Dialect Dictionary) will gather these data together into a single resource in which they will be sorted and classified.
The present dictionary is the first phase in a pilot study and is simply the result of bringing most of the Montgomeryshire collections together. There are almost 6,000 words in this corpus, drawn from 21 sources.
The pilot project has two specific aims: to develop a suitable methodology for a dialect dictionary for the whole of Wales and to estimate the time and work involved in preparing it.
"As we classified the Montgomeryshire data, we found that some of the words are not mentioned in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru and that the meaning or distribution of others in our county is not recorded there," said Professor Thomas. "We therefore expect that the dialect dictionary will be a significant contribution to our knowledge of the language."
Handling such a large and diverse corpus poses linguistic and organisational challenges; it was decided at the outset that this would be undertaken electronically.
The linguistic side is managed by Professor Peter Wynn Thomas of the Cardiff University School of Welsh. The computational work is undertaken by I.T. expert, Mick van Rootseler, M.A., Arnhem. Awel Edwards, Nia Lewis, Heledd Owain, and Fflur Owens (undergraduate students at Cardiff University) have helped with data preparation.
"There is still a great deal of work to be done on both the linguistic and presentational fronts.," said Professor Thomas. "Our initial aim is to produce a series of county dialect dictionaries. When we have done this, we shall bring all the dictionaries together in one Wales-wide dictionary."
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