37.751, Reviews: Conversations on Dictionaries: Ilan Stavans (ed.) (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-751. Tue Feb 24 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.751, Reviews: Conversations on Dictionaries: Ilan Stavans (ed.) (2025)

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Date: 24-Feb-2026
From: Troy E Spier [tspier2 at gmail.com]
Subject: Ilan Stavans (ed.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-3186

Title: Conversations on Dictionaries
Subtitle: The Universe in a Book
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/ch/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/history-english-language/conversations-dictionaries-universe-book?format=PB&isbn=9781009392396

Editor(s): Ilan Stavans

Reviewer: Troy E Spier

SUMMARY
For many lay-people, dictionaries often evoke emotions at the
extremes: They might serve as a simple, mostly irrelevant testament to
an earlier time; as an origin of frustration and boredom rooted in
primary or secondary school; or as the definitive source of all
worldly knowledge. In the case of “Conversations on Dictionaries: The
Universe in a Book,” however, the reader never encounters boredom on
his or her global journey through the history of lexicographic efforts
among a number of the world’s language stocks, including natural and
constructed variants. Containing twenty-three chapters, inclusive of
the introduction and conclusion, Stavans’ edited volume offers
nuanced, slightly-modified transcriptions of interviews—conducted
face-to-face, synchronously through Zoom, or asynchronously via email
in a variety of languages—with the twenty-six contributors. The
following discussion is organized not around the sequential chapters
but, rather, around language stocks and geography to understand more
cohesively what this text offers.
The Indo-European languages are the most well represented and cover
Germanic, Italic, Slavic, Celtic, and Hellenic varieties. These
include the following, respectively: German (Ch. 3), English (Ch. 6),
Yiddish (Ch. 15), and Scandinavian (Ch. 20); French (Ch. 7), Italian
(Ch. 8), Portuguese (Ch. 16), and Spanish (Ch. 21); Russian (Ch. 18);
Irish (Ch. 12); and Ancient Greek (Ch. 1). In the opening chapter on
Ancient Greek, the tone for much of what follows is established
through a pointed characterization of language as “an organism [...
that] is alive if it is changing over time, growing, moving,
interacting with other organisms, spawning offspring” (p. 4). With the
exception of Ancient Greek, whose trajectory highlights liturgy and
classical literature, the remaining Indo-European chapters trace a
comparatively similar, historiographic path: Early word lists preceded
more fully-developed, bilingual dictionaries, mostly paired with Latin
and produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Despite being similar in this regard to one another, additional
language planning was undertaken differently to reflect national and
sociolinguistic interests: German witnessed the development of
regional dictionaries, English gave rise to questions about the
relative significance of dictionary size, French and Spanish
contributed to standardization through the establishment of formal
academies, and important questions about the legitimacy of a language
in the first place are considered, particularly for Yiddish and
Russian. Particularly noteworthy are the seventh-century word lists in
Irish; the observation that Yiddish depended on dictionaries as an
instrument of continuity, as it lacked an army, a navy, and a
territory; and the unique, Soviet-era, morphologically-aligned
dictionaries produced during the pre-digital era.
The Afroasiatic languages are represented by Arabic (Ch. 9) and Hebrew
(Ch. 10). Lexicographic pursuits were initiated for Arabic in the
eighth century, but the first bilingual Arabic/Latin dictionary
emerged in the twelfth century in Arab-controlled Spain, and shorter
dictionaries focused on specific semantic categories which emerged to
support religious and secular subjects. On the other hand, the first
word lists for Hebrew emerged in the tenth century, but the eleventh
century was a truly productive period for formalized dictionaries; as
for Arabic, these initially took as their primary focus liturgical
undertakings. In both cases, however, the organizational schemes
changed over time: sometimes alphabetized, sometimes organized around
morphological roots (viz. triliteral and quadriliteral roots), and
sometimes according to the lexical items’ final syllables.
Additionally, the difficulty of alphabetization is acknowledged
through the recognition that short vowels were and remain
inconsistently rendered in writing.
The languages of East Asia are represented by Sino-Tibetan (Ch. 4) and
Japonic (Ch. 17). In the case of Chinese, the interviewee begins by
calling attention to the long tradition of writing, extending beyond
three thousand years, before describing the complexity of reducing
patterns, characters, and lexical items to a coherent written form
based ultimately on the six dimensions necessary for an understanding
of such writing, including those that are “self-explanatory,
pictographic, pictophonetic, ideographic, mutually explanatory, and
phonetic loans” (p. 47). Nonetheless, the earliest dictionaries for
Chinese had been devised for exegetical purposes when attempting to
understand the classics, and perhaps the world’s first dictionary to
recognize dialectal variation was also produced for Chinese
approximately two thousand years ago. On the other hand, Japanese,
which utilizes three different orthographies, has a tradition dating
back to the eighth century and has, in contrast to many of the other
languages discussed in the book, a significant number of specialized
dictionaries. The historiographical treatment of Japanese dictionaries
is bifurcated in this interview into those that precede and those that
follow World War II, and the interviewee explains that reference
companions of various sizes are not only widely available, but also
exceedingly popular. The discussion that follows shifts toward the
distinctions between abridged and comprehensive dictionaries,
monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, and printed and electronic
dictionaries, and the important role of academic and missionizing
projects is considered.
The languages of the Americas are examined through Uto-Aztecan (Ch.
14), Quechuan (Ch. 19), and a range of others in the Western
Hemisphere (Ch. 11). These three chapters refer overwhelmingly to the
languages of North and South America, albeit from different
perspectives, in describing the lexicographic histories of Nahuatl and
Quechua. In the case of the former, a late-fifteenth century,
bilingual dictionary (Latin/Spanish) served as the basis for a
mid-sixteenth century, trilingual dictionary that included Nahuatl,
and those that followed primarily relied on European-style, word-level
classifications for lexical and grammatical categories, but they
differed in presenting lexical items and longer phrases as separate or
combined entries that were not necessarily alphabetized. Contemporary
dictionaries have built upon this groundwork and are oftentimes even
available as mobile applications through the Apple Store and Google
Playstore, too.
In stark contrast, the chapters on Quechua (Ch. 19) and ‘indigenous’
languages (Ch. 11) open with more abstract issues. For instance,
Quechua is not precisely one language but, rather, a cover-all term
for many related but different varieties. In producing a dictionary
for this idealized, monolithic Quechua, though, decisions had to be
made in adapting existing terminology where, for instance, ‘hucha’
assumes the meaning of the Spanish ‘pecado’ (“sin”) despite actually
meaning “being at fault for not being reciprocal” (p. 244). Poetry and
a recent translation into Quechua of Don Quixote are also available.
Both Nahuatl and Quechua are ‘indigenous’ languages, as this
designation references both a power differential and a dislocation
from time and space. In addressing this, the interviewee also calls
attention to the unresolved debate between a ‘language’ and a
‘dialect’ before describing sixteenth-century, often-missionizing work
on Nahuatl, Mixtec, Laurentian, and Carolina Algonquian, in addition
to seventeenth-century work on Montagnais (Cree), Massachusett, and
Huron.
The languages of the African continent are represented primarily
through reference to East and South Africa with particular emphasis
upon Swahili and Shona (Ch. 13). However, each of the stocks receives
their own, albeit brief, attention: Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo,
and Nilo-Saharan. The first bilingual dictionary was produced in the
mid-seventeenth century, and the diachronic tension between
monolingual and bilingual dictionaries is considered, interrogating
the purpose of dictionaries and questioning whether educational
contexts, in addition to the colonial histories, impact these pursuits
and the usefulness of dictionaries in the first place. Lexicographic
projects in digital environments are also addressed, such as the Taa
Language Online Dictionary (Khoisan), the Kamusi Project
(Niger-Congo), and the African Languages Lexical Project
(Niger-Congo). Finally, this interview closes with a discussion of
creolized linguistic varieties in Cape Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe, and
Mauritius.
Languages resulting from sustained contact in diglossic contexts
between or among other linguistic varieties are addressed through
recourse primarily to Spanglish and Yinglish, accompanied by passing
references to Franglais, Portuñol, and African American Vernacular
English (Ch. 5). Although all the interviews in this volume
demonstrate the planned, deliberate, mostly successful creation of
dictionaries, the situation faced by mixed varieties is analogized to
all languages more broadly: “Language is by definition chaotic. It is
also absolutely free. Life in a structured society imposes limits on
everything, including how we arrange our words, the order that syntax
brings along, the effort at standardization” (p. 59). In fact, it is
in this chapter that the reader uncovers not only the diglossic
contexts from which hybrid languages emerge, but also the deeply
personal, compelling rationale for the author’s development of this
book and the significant, exciting journeys that individual words
follow until they arrive at the present moment. Particularly in the
case of Spanish (and, thus, the resulting Spanglish), the reader
becomes aware of the tension that accompanies linguistic varieties
when they come into contact with governments, academic bodies, works
of literature, and religion. This interview closes with a discussion
about constructed languages like Quenya and Esperanto, among others.
Esperanto serves as the archetypical example of constructed languages
(Ch. 2), and the conversation opens with an explanation of the origin
and development of arguably the most well-known of all constructed
languages, boasting speakers throughout the world, some of whom
self-report as native speakers. As an overtly planned project, the
first dictionary of Esperanto was released in the late nineteenth
century as a collection of almost one thousand roots accompanied by
the morphological rules necessary to derive new words. The interview
shifts toward a discussion of sociological, historical, and colonial
factors, noting that Esperanto, despite being inherently Eurocentric
as a result of its focus on the IE languages of Europe, found a home
among the world’s countries, which has contributed in large part to
its growth and the successful expansion of the vocabulary. Indeed, the
discussion notes that one could not talk about tigers, monkeys, and
giraffes in 1887 and, instead, had to wait almost twenty years for
these to be incorporated into the lexicon.
When understood in relation to one another, these chapters share
interviews that present lexicography as a global practice shaped by
historical, religious, institutional, and sociolinguistic factors.
Although the actual trajectories for each language are not identical,
they collectively illustrate for the reader that dictionaries are not
purely a reference text but, rather, a living testament to the history
and continued development of a language.
EVALUATION
For anyone with a personal or professional interest in the subject,
“Conversations on Dictionaries: The Universe in a Book” presents a
fascinating account of the strides made in this domain throughout
human history. Through its effective coverage of so many language
stocks, it also provides a valuable opportunity to discover the
broader geographical and sociocultural contexts surrounding those
lexicographic efforts. Likewise, because they generally range in
length from twelve to fifteen pages, each chapter is short enough to
be manageable but simultaneously long enough to open a window for
further exploration. Additionally, the intentionally less formal, yet
professional and erudite, tone adopted throughout renders the
discussions quite accessible, and it is complemented by the brief
contextualization offered at the start of each chapter. Finally, the
suggested readings that follow each interview offer a chance for
continued exploration, as these are not intended to be entirely
comprehensive.
While the content of the interviews demonstrated clear expertise in
these lexicographic traditions and a genuine interest in communicating
historiographical knowledge to readers, the organization of the
chapters was admittedly uneven. For instance, the Indo-European
languages are heavily overrepresented, constituting approximately half
of the interviews. Although this was likely influenced by the fact
that these are heavily documented and often studied, other language
stocks are represented only by one or two varieties; in another
instance, essentially the entire continent of Africa, despite its
incredible linguistic and extralinguistic diversity, is reduced to a
single chapter. What this means, then, is that any singular language
is provided the same amount of space as a geographic area containing
potentially two thousand languages. Similarly, the Germanic and Italic
languages dominate these chapters, leaving no coverage of other major
branches with long, noteworthy histories, such as Baltic, Albanian,
Armenian, Sanskrit, and Persian. The selection of languages seems to
be informed at least in part by the author’s personal and professional
interests, but the natural consequence, then, is that truly equitable
coverage–as promised in the subtitle–remains unrealized.
In addition to the uneven distribution of the language stocks, the
actual organization of the chapters feels somewhat dissatisfying, as
the eleven Indo-European chapters are distributed throughout the
volume, while others, sometimes covering far more ‘ground’ than a
single linguistic variety, punctuate those as an intermission. This
cannot be entirely explained by the order in which the interviews were
conducted, as the chapter on indigenous languages (Ch. 11) references
the interview on Quechua (Ch. 19) in a way that requires the latter to
have occurred before the former. It is perfectly reasonable, for
instance, to begin with Ancient Greek if the volume adopts a
chronological approach, but this would require the chapter on ‘hybrid’
languages and Esperanto to appear at the end of the text. In this way,
the chapters should be read as complementary but non-sequential.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Troy E. Spier is Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics at
Florida A&M University. He earned his MA and Ph.D. in Linguistics at
Tulane University, his B.S.Ed. in English/Secondary Education at
Kutztown University, and a graduate certificate in Islamic Studies at
Dallas International University. His research interests include
language documentation and description, discourse analysis, corpus
linguistics, and linguistic landscapes.



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