Vicav – Vienna Corpus of Arabic Varieties

The Vienna Corpus of Arabic Varieties (VICAV) was set up with two main purposes in mind: to create and maintain a virtual research platform targeting the particular needs of Arabic dialectology and to serve as a test bed for newly developed text technological methods and tools.

VICAV was conceived as a means of promoting the efficient exchange of ideas and experiences in an active international community. Situated at the interface between areal and corpus linguistics, the aim is to collect a variety of digital language resources for a number of different locations. The description of the different varieties depends on language profiles, concise and uniformly structured forms that provide information on the research history, available literature, salient grammatical features, etc. of particular varieties. VICAV provides bibliographies, dictionaries, glossaries and various transcribed texts.

The project aims to offer a platform to a community that is increasingly producing digital data but still lacks the infrastructure to make it widely available. The project is a collaboration between the Department of Near Eastern Studies of the University of Vienna and the ACDH-CH. It is also part of the CLARIN-AT project bundle, which aims to increase language resources for under-resourced language varieties. The research interests of the ACDH-CH in this project are related to issues of digital lexicography, visualisation of digital language resources in a multilingual environment and the application of standards, in particular the community standard as put down in the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), in the creation of digital language resources.

VICAV is currently undergoing a major overhaul. Among others, it will incorporate data from the TUNICO, TUNOCENT, SHAWI and WIBARAB projects.