EDD Online 4.0: Preparation and Publication

Just as traditional dialects used to play a major role in the German-speaking world and were the basis of historical language development, so English existed, especially in its oral form, mainly in dialects. For Great Britain this was particularly true until the end of the19th century the percentage of those who then spoke Standard English was less than 3%, and today it is still less than 4%. These facts justify the timely publication of the English Dialect Dictionary(EDD), which was created around 1900 by the Oxford professor Joseph Wright and many helpers for the period from 1700 to 1900. It is the most comprehensive English dialect dictionary ever, comprising 4,670 pages. It was brought to life digitally as a freely available database resource in about 15 years of work of an Innsbruck project team funded by the Austrian Science Fund and directed by the applicant Manfred Markus. The publication of the EDD Online (version 3.0) database at the end of 2019 was received very positively, partly euphorically by peers around the world ("brilliant ... clearly tremendous ... wonderful," etc.). The database conveys not only dialectical vocabulary, but also patterns of word formation, phonetics and spelling, features of meaning, regional and temporal correlation, etymological backgrounds, and much more. It also allows for the quantification and mapping of findings required for a modern type of English dialectology, not only for the British Isles, but worldwide. However, given this ambitious query potential, the use of EDD Online over the last two years has shown that programming errors have been made, particularly in the field of frequency recordings, but also in some other areas. Whoever has been familiarised with the multifaceted structure of entries in the EDD and the accordingly complex search engine of EDD Online 3.0 will be ready to apologize these deficits. The requested project EDD Online 4.0 promises to free the Innsbruck database from all its remaining errors, mainly by hiring the former experienced team members. In addition, the worldwide use of EDD Online will be encouraged and promoted more intensively than has been the case so far, among other things through a revised edition of the Guide of 2017 offered to users on the online platform. The launching of version 4.0 of EDD Online will, by the repair work on the search tools, set a new standard in dialectology, allowing for empirical research that has hitherto been impossible, in fields such as historical linguistics, computer-based lexicography, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics.