SHAWI Dictionary

The SHAWI dictionary collects data on the lexis of Arabic-speaking Bedouins who live as small-scale pastoralists in various regions of south-eastern Turkey, Syria and Iraq. It represents the first digital resource on this group of dialects, is largely based on data from Harran-Urfa and is being compiled on the basis of the corpus created in the same project. In the final phase, it will make available the entire vocabulary of the published SHAWI corpus.

As part of the VICAV project cluster, all lexical data are structured in accordance with the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). It is the first product among the VICAV dictionaries to be provided with an ODD and fully encoded in Lex-0. The dictionary is created with the help of the ˂TEI˃Enricher, a general purpose XML editor that is also used for annotating the corpus and for linking the dictionary data to the corpus. As part of the project, the dictionary is also used to generate input for the semi-automatic annotation of the corpus.

The project is being conducted in close cooperation with the Institute of Oriental Studies of the University of Vienna.