Lexicographical Developments in the Shona Language as Reflected in the Making of the Duramazwi Guru ReChiShona (DGS)

Abstract

Tin's article traces lexicogiaphical developments in Shona, one of the major languages of Zimbabwe, with particular focus on corpus building and the role the corpus has played in Shona lexicography in the past hundred or so years and recent developments as reflected in the making o/Duramazwi Guru ReChiShona by the African Languages Research Institute (ALR1) team of the University of Zimbabwe. Background Lexicography in Shona is not a new discipline. It dates as far back as the 1850s when missionaries began constructing orthographies for Shona speakers in the areas in which the missionaries were stationed. These early orthographies were to be used to construct vocabularies that would enable the translation of religious texts from English into Shona. From then until the 1990s, several glossaries and dictionaries were produced. As Fortune (1979,1992) correctly observed, Shona dictionaries compiled in this period were all bilingual in nature. Their primary purpose was to provide a written basis for the lexical items of the language as a whole (Fortune 1992:18) and were targeted at foreign mission workers, settlers, miners, and prospectors in order to aid them in their interactions and contacts with the local people. Most of these early publications were essentially grammar texts that merely described the nature of the language to non-Shona speakers. According to Fortune, these early publications revealed both the compilers' very limited knowledge of the language and of the techniques of dictionary making (1992: 17). The fact that compilers of these early publications were describing a language that had not been written before, often worked in isolation in their remote mission stations and relied mainly on their own Bible translations for headwords or lexical items to use in the