Mari-English Dictionary

The goal of this project is to prepare a Mari-English online dictionary. Mari is a language spoken by roughly half a million people in the Volga basin and Ural region of the Russian Federation. It has been classified as an endangered language by UNESCO. The proposed dictionary would be a vital tool for both native speakers of Mari and all those interested in the Mari language, culture, ethnography, religion, folk music etc. around the world. The project will be carried out at the Department of Finno-Ugric Studies at the University of Vienna over the course of three years, under the direction of the head of this department and with the participation of a native speaker of Mari. In addition, we intend to hire one person full-time for the tenure of the project and one or two research assistants part-time. Our department is currently in a unique position to create this much needed dictionary, as it has two native speakers of English who are competent in Mari and also, between them, all other languages in which source materials exist. One member of the project team is an expert in computer science who can manage the technological aspects of this undertaking. Another member of the project team is a native speaker of Mari. Modern lexicographical materials on Mari are available only in Russian, Finnish and Hungarian. In addition, they are difficult to obtain, too limited or dated. This is a great hindrance for non-Maris interested in this unique culture, as it is to the growing number of Maris who want to participate in the international community (especially through the medium of the Internet) and need English for this purpose. With an extensive Mari-English dictionary published on the Internet, we intend to address these issues. Our aim is to create a dictionary containing some 50,000 lexemes, covering the vocabulary used in the standard Mari language from the 1920s to the present. As a web resource, such a Mari-English dictionary could also be used as a makeshift English-Mari dictionary, as users could use the search engine to locate English words in the translations of Mari lexemes. Partners in Russia and Finland have supplied us with a variety of raw materials needed for this project. We intend to fill in gaps by analysing an extensive corpus of publications from recent years, covering a broad spectrum of themes and topics. Our dictionary will play an indispensable and pivotal role in a Mari web platform currently under development at the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology. It will be coordinated with other linguistic materials we have already developed, are in the process of preparing or intend to develop, such as the world`s first English-language textbook on Mari, didactic software, compilations of selected reading texts for students of Mari and electronic reading aids.

The Mari-English dictionary, publicly accessible at dict.mari-language.com, to date constitutes by far the largest effort to link a Finno-Ugric minority language of Russia with English. It currently covers 42,561 headwords and 82,742 subentries and example sentences with an English translation, including some 10,749 set phrases. The dictionarys primary aim was to cover the contemporary Mari literary language. It was compiled by English-speaking scholars working on Mari at the University of Vienna, with the involvement of a Mari native linguist from Mari State University in Yoshkar-Ola, Russia. It will constitute a valuable and unique resource for both the Finno-Ugric scholarly community, for all those interested in Mari history, culture, and literature, and for the Mari community itself. To accommodate the needs of native speakers, the interface was also implemented i n Mari and Russian3. The documentation and extensive instructions on the functionalities of our software are also available in three languages4. The dictionary is published under a Creative Commons license, giving users the right to distribute and adapt our database and software in whatever way they wish, as long as attribution is given. Furthermore, thanks to a follow-up grant by the Finnish Kone Foundation, the editors will have the means to update and supplement the dictionary when the need arises. Users can make suggestions on specific entries through a feedback function. The dictionary is coupled with a morphological analyzer of Mari, which allows users to search words by their inflected forms. Various end-user applications based on the coupling of these resources will be available shortly (a spelling checker, a reading aid, a corpus infrastructure) at morph.mari-language.com and corpus.mari-language.com. The aforementioned follow-up grant will also enable us to include the second literary standard of Mari, Hill Mari, in addition to the dominant Meadow Mari standard already covered. An overview of press materials on the project can be found at press.mari-language.com. 3muter.mari-language.com, slovarj.mari-language.com 4www.univie.ac.at/maridict/site-2014/doc/dict_en.pdf, www.univie.ac.at/maridict/site2014/doc/dict_ma.pdf, www.univie.ac.at/maridict/site-2014/doc/dict_ru.pdf