The Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd Edition

40World Englishes and Lexicography

FREDRIC T. DOLEZAL

1 Introduction

Dictionaries are artifacts that represent the cultural, bibliographic, and linguistic heritage of a language community. All the ideological underpinnings, the tensions inherent in proposing the study of Englishes, the hierarchies of English varieties, and the very concept of the English language itself are revealed when we have to collect, identify, describe, and explain the printed and spoken linguistic evidence. These tasks, essential to the practice of lexicography, make the compilation of a dictionary of world Englishes a complex collaborative undertaking that can be years in the unfolding. Linguistic, literary, cultural, and even political considerations are brought to the foreground of our research, separately and intertwined, the moment we decide to record and explain the English language of a community of speakers (in some cases speakers and writers). The notion of legitimacy for pluralized Englishes (e.g. Kachru & Kahane 1995) largely rests upon the presence or absence of an authoritative text called “the dictionary,” the authority of which may depend on popular notions of the standard when applied to a language. Because the idea of a dictionary is so firmly rooted, even traditional, within the history of English and Englishes, there are certain expectations from users, lexicographers, and publishers that theorists and practitioners must observe and negotiate.

There are basic linguistic requirements ...