Abstract
Despite the fact that lexicographers have increasingly been taking more care when it comes to defining socially sensitive terms, we argue that ethnicity terms still remain rather poorly defined. In a number of online monolingual dictionaries we surveyed in this study, we find that ethnicity terms are generally simplistically defined, mostly in terms of geography and citizenship, and argue that such definitions are too reductionist and sometimes even erroneous. We also find that some disparaging ethnicity terms are not labelled as such in some of the dictionaries surveyed. We also present a case study from Montenegro, in which a dictionary of the national academy of sciences was immediately revoked over a few ethnicity and ethnicity-related terms, after a violent outcry from two of Montenegro's ethnic minorities, dissatisfied with how their ethnicities were defined and treated in the dictionary. Based on our survey and the earlier findings from the literature, we recommend that international dictionaries follow a standardised model of defining ethnicities, which would additionally refer to an ethnicity's culture and potentially language, and be as inclusive as possible. We also recommend that editors and lexicographers of national dictionaries pay special attention to how they define the ethnic terms relating to the minorities living in their country or region, following a combination of a standardised and a partly customised approach, which would take into account the specific features of the minorities.
Highlights
A typical user expects a general dictionary to contain ethnicity terms and to define them (Rader 1989)
We find this very problematic as citizenship may be held by members of ethnic minorities living in that particular country who do not belong under the related ethnic term, e.g. in this particular case, there are Serbs, Montenegrins and Greeks living in Albania, many of them probably holding the Albanian citizenship but, generally, they would not call themselves Albanians
In this paper we described the problems of defining ethnicity terms in dictionaries
Summary
A typical user expects a general dictionary to contain ethnicity terms and to define them (Rader 1989). Even though lexicographers have been making great efforts to improve their treatment of various politically sensitive and socially charged terms over the last decades, ethnic terms in dictionaries are still described rather poorly, usually just in geographical terms and even in those cases, sometimes too restrictively. In this paper we will describe one such recent case from Montenegro, as well as inspect the literature on the issue and comparatively analyse the definitions of ethnic terms in various online monolingual dictionaries (English, German, Italian, Croatian, Serbian, and Albanian). We start the paper by surveying the relevant literature on how dictionaries treat politically sensitive terms, with a special focus on ethnic terms
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