The Dictionary of historical Bavarian dialects in Austria and South Tyrol (WBÖ) - formerly Dictionary of Bavarian dialects in Austria - looks back on a long history in the course of which it has repeatedly undergone conceptual changes and innovations, although the original aim of the project has been maintained to this day: the documentation and scientific research of the rich lexis of Bavarian in Austria and South Tyrol.
At the end of 2016, the project, which had been discontinued in the meantime, was completely reorganized in terms of concept and personnel. The innovations included the expansion of the project objective (from purely lexicographical work to the extended areas of responsibility of the WBÖ project cluster) and the strong digital-technical orientation of the entire project cluster, especially its lexicographical area of responsibility.
Regarding the lexicographical work, the aim was to modernize and standardize the structure of the dictionary articles. This not only ensures better readability and user-friendliness, but also a consistent structure of the dictionary entries. In addition, the articles were published online on the LIÖ (Lexical Information System Austria) platform, which ensures their accessibility. The embedding in LIÖ also enables the dictionary articles to be linked to the underlying data, thus ensuring a deeper and more comprehensive insight into the linguistic contexts.
Parallel to the modernization of the presentation, measures have been implemented to streamline and speed up the lexicographical work process. These steps contribute to making the scientific processing of Bavarian lexis more efficient and productive without compromising the high quality and accuracy of the documentation.
The conceptual principles and changes in the lexicographical work, which on the one hand make the articles more reader-friendly and on the other hand ensure greater efficiency, include the following points in particular:
a simplified lemmatization based on the standard language
a uniform article structure for all lemmas
shortening the etymology information
largely forgoing information on customs, superstitions, etc.
more extensive information on geographical distribution (except for phonetic evidence and documentary evidence)
changes to the information on word formation: derivations and compounds are only included in the article if a meaning can also be given
a separate field for all idioms for a lemma