[Lexicog] Kweyol dictionary: Why popular? How user-friendly?

[David Frank]

Wayne --

I would like to think that our Kweyol Dictionary is a tremendous success
because of my keen eye for an attractive layout and deep insights into the
needs and aspirations of the Kweyol-speaking public. One problem with that
idea, though, is that I know very little about how the dictionary has been
received and is being used after it launching. True, the dictionary did seem
to get an enthusiastic reception when it was first launched, but I have not
gotten much information since then.

I will say this: for any such publication as this, you have to choose your
audience, and we decided to aim this publication at a St. Lucian audience
rather than academics outside of St. Lucia. (Virtually all of the population
of St. Lucia, numbering around 160,000, speaks Kweyol as either a first or
second language.)

Yes, the price is a crucial factor. It is not selling for $10/each by
accident or default. As a matter of fact, that price is in Eastern Caribbean
dollars, and in US dollars it would be less than $4/each. The dictionary is
paperback with a color cover, 5.5" x 8.5", 325 pages + xviii pages of front
matter. The publisher was the St. Lucia Ministry of Education, and the
contents were donated gratis to the publisher (with copyright retained by
SIL). The printing was done in St. Lucia, and as you can see from the
selling price, nobody involved in the process made any profit or earned
royalties from the publication. Still, I believe the US$4 selling price was
the cost of printing -- actually, the wholesale price would be less than
that -- and there was not necessarily any subsidy involved apart from the
donation of time and effort. The government did have to come up with some
capital, too, for the initial printing.

There was not necessarily anything wrong with the earlier dictionary,
compiled by the late Jones Mondesir, except that the only publisher that the
compiler and editor could find was Mouton de Gruyter, and that explains its
price. The result was that Mondesir's dictionary was inaccessible to the St.
Lucian public. Actually, another problem was that it used a somewhat
idiosyncratic spelling. We began our dictionary in 1984 and it was only
several years later that we learned about Mondesir's dictionary draft. I had
the pleasure of knowing him for a few years. I don't remember the exact
timing, but he passed away around the time his dictionary, which he had been
quietly working on for decades, appeared in print.

The editor for Mondesir's dictionary was Prof. Lawrence Carrington of the
University of the West Indies. Carrington helped refine Mondesir's
dictionary for publication -- and a very big and time-consuming job that
turned out to be -- and find a publisher for it. This same Carrington spoke
highly of our dictionary, as quoted on the Lexicography List web site and --
accompanied by other testimonials -- on the back cover of the Kweyol
Dictionary.

When Mondesir announced his dictionary, we put plans on hold for publishing
our own but kept collecting data. Because of the price of Mondesir's
dictionary and its nonstandard spelling, and with the encouragement of the
Ministry of Education and other prominent people in St. Lucia, we later
resumed our publication plans. The compilers included expatriate SIL members
Paul Crosbie and myself, who worked in St. Lucia from 1984 through 2000, and
native Kweyol speakers Mano Leon and Peter Samuel. When Paul Crosbie and I
left St. Lucia at the end of 2000, we had finished going over the whole
dictionary as a group, but I had to finish the editing in the States. On one
trip back to St. Lucia I did the layout and on another trip I participated
in the launching.

If there is a success story here, it is about the teamwork involved in
making the dictionary possible and at a price everyone can afford.

A couple of other notes...

The key words in the dictionary are in blue. I thought this was good for
ease of use, but it proved to be a problem in the printing. In some early
copies of the dictionary I saw, on some pages the blue key words were
completely missing, and on other pages the alignment was way off. I hope
that problem was eventually lessened, but still the way the printing was
done -- running the page through the press twice -- the alignment of black
and blue was such a problem that I started to regret trying the two-color
approach.

The bulk of the dictionary is Kweyol-English and there is a shorter
English-Kweyol index at the end. At the very end there are four pages of
illustrations with Kweyol labels, including a human body and a map of St.
Lucia. In the front matter there is a guide to the use of the dictionary and
a spelling guide. This dictionary does not have a grammar sketch. I hope to
eventually do a grammar as a companion volume, again aimed at a St. Lucian
audience.

I got about 20 copies of the dictionary when it first came out and have
given most of them away and haven't been able to get resupplied since then.
I regret that I haven't been able to send copies to journals for review,
such as the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, nor make the dictionary
available to linguists.

The program we used for compiling data was my own. I call it my Dictionary
Database Editor. I wrote this program in Pascal back in DOS days and before
Shoebox came out, and I later ported it to Windows using Delphi. My
Dictionary Database Editor can be used for entering or editing data, and for
constraining it. It can also sort the data and print it out formatted, to be
further processed with Word for Windows. Since I came out with my own
program and crafted it for our needs in St. Lucia, I never learned to use
Shoebox and MDF. I still prefer my own program, but the problem is that it
is hard-coded for the particulars of St. Lucian Creole. I may adapt it in
the source code for the next language I plan to compile a dictionary for,
though I should also learn to use Shoebox and MDF for when I am giving
consulting help to others.

I could provide samples from our dictionary, but I don't believe the Yahoo
Lexicography List allows either formatted messages or graphics, does it?
What I should really do is expand our www.saintluciancreole.org web site to
show these things, except that I am backed up on things to do right now.

-- David Frank




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