The lexicography of Icelandic

Abstract

Icelandic lexicography has its origins in the seventeenth century, but the first monolingual Icelandic dictionary was not published until 1963. The complexities of Icelandic grammar impose certain demands in lexicography, as the morphology is rich and irregular, and case assignment of verbs calls for an exact description of argument structure. These demands cannot be met to a satisfactory degree in printed dictionaries, but the advent of online dictionaries has opened up new possibilities. In the past years, the building of a lexicographic macrostructure has undergone changes, introducing multi-word lemmas to a much larger degree than previously possible. Current Icelandic lexicographic work is supported by four major corpora, and a range of other digital resources for the language, but still more are needed. The Icelandic language community is tiny, but through the combined efforts and co-operation of lexicographers and the language technology community, the future seems to be in context-sensitive lexicography, to the benefit of both those groups and, hopefully, also the language community at large.