TUNICO Dictionary

The TUNICO dictionary is a micro-diachronic dictionary of the spoken Arabic variety of the Tunisian capital based on two sources: (a) transcriptions of recordings of more than 30 hours of dialogues and narrative interviews collected during a field study in 2013 as part of the TUNICO project (Linguistic dynamics in the Greater Tunis Area). Besides (b) a number of additional sources were integrated into the dictionary, data from supplementary interviews with young Tunisians and lexical material from various published historical sources from the mid-20th century. The most important of these sources is Hans-Rudolf Singer's monumental grammar (1984; almost 800 pages) of the Medina of Tunis. Singer's data has been systematically analysed and integrated into the dictionary, with all material being referenced to the book. In addition, other sources (Nicolas 1911, Marçais/Guîga 1958-61, Quéméneur 1962, Abdellatif 2010) were also consulted in order to verify and supplement the contemporary data. The diachronic dimension contributed to a better understanding of processes in the development of the lexicon (for more details, see Moerth, Prochazka & Dallaji 2014).

For the ACDH-CH, the programme provided a test environment to develop and test VICAV-related technologies. The project experimented with web-based dictionary interfaces and the linking of dictionary and corpus. The main tool for editing the project's lexicographic data was the Viennese Lexicographic Editor (VLE), an application that enabled lexicographers to edit standards-based lexicographic and terminological data in virtually any XML-based format such as Lexical Markup Framework (LMF; ISO 24613:2008), TermBase eXchange (TBX; ISO 30042:2008), Resource Description Framework (RDF) or TEI. The tool enabled collaborative editing of dictionaries on the Internet and was based entirely on XML and related technologies (XPath, XQuery, XSLT, XML Schema).

The dictionary was created as part of the project Linguistic dynamics in the Greater Tunis Area: a corpus-based approach (TUNICO), ran from August 2013 to July 2016, was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF; P-25706) and was carried out as a joint project of the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.