Speakers
Description
The Czecho(-)17Slovak Word of the Week was a joint year-long popularization project of the Institute of the Czech National Corpus and the Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, which was inaugurated on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia (January 1, 1993). Throughout the year, each week, a new entry written in parallel in Czech and Slovak was published on the project website18. We intended to draw the attention of both the Czech and the Slovak public (especially the younger generation, for whom the former mutual intelligibility between the two languages no longer holds) to the interesting parallels, but chiefly the differences, between our two languages. We tried to do so in a user-friendly and entertaining way, the central part of each entry being a language feuilleton (a very popular genre both in Czechia and Slovakia), supplemented with data drawn from language corpora (SYN2015, SYN2020, and ORAL v1 for Czech19; prim-10.0-public-all and s-hovor-7.0 for Slovak20) and the respective entries from some (mostly older) monolingual
and bilingual dictionaries (Bernolák 1825, Jungmann 1835–1839, SSJČ 1960–1971, SSJ 1959–1968, KSSJ 2003, ČSS 1981, SČS 1967). In a way, we see our website as a dictionary with a fixed macrostructure (52 entries, including some multi-word units) and a microstructure determined by the order of the individual components. The target audience is presented with various lexicographic information – be it frequency statistics for various text types, examples from both written and spoken corpora, or quotes from older dictionaries – unobtrusively, covertly, and usually without them having the feeling that they are “leafing through” a dictionary.
Our demo presentation is focused mainly on various non-technical aspects of the project, such as project team setup, workflow, promotion, responses from the public, etc. Our team was primarily comprised of external writers of feuilletons, mostly linguists. Their texts were edited, proofread, and supplemented with information from corpora and dictionaries so that each entry had the same microstructure. In addition, a programmer and a graphic designer were necessary to implement the project successfully. Altogether, there were more than 30 people involved in the project. In addition, the feuilletons were regularly printed by prominent Czech (Deník N21) and Slovak (Denník N22) dailies and featured on
their websites, disseminating our effort among thousands of extra readers.23
The project website’s access logs indicate a decrease in traffic after the project was officially completed in December 2023. The “Unique visitors” value (based on the IP address) displayed by the log visualization program is more or less irrelevant here, as commercial Internet providers in both the Cech Republic and Slovakia usually assign the same IP address to many different users. Nonetheless, several thousands of hits peaking on the day of the weekly publication can be observed. These statistics, however, do not include access via the respective portals of both newspapers.
The positive reactions of the readers convince us of the meaningfulness of our work as well as a possible extension of the project. At least three possible uses can be imagined: 1) another, follow-up project created by the users themselves (user-generated content supervised by professional editors); 2) other language pairs (Czech-German/Polish, Slovak-Hungarian/Polish); 3) adding another language(s) (e.g., those of the Visegrád area: Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian). We also want to encourage our fellow lexicographers to adapt a similar project to their languages. Given the venue of this year’s Euralex, a Croatian-Serbian version is suggested (possibly extended to the BCMS phenomenon), besides other European languages, e.g., Walloon-Flemish, Finnish-Estonian, Scandinavian languages, etc., or minority languages related to majority languages (Catalan-Spanish, Basque-Spanish and/or French, Latgalian-Latvian, etc.).
