Dictionary Society of North America

Louis T. Milic
Secretary-Treasurer, DSNA

Lexicography has long been an international activity. Even single-language dictionaries have international reach, to the foreign countries where the language is spoken, read or understood. Bilingual dictionaries are all the more international, since they involve not only the meanings but the cultures of two different countries. And those countries that have highly developed lexicographic traditions also provide technical assistance to countries eager to make their languages available to others. For example, American lexicographers are active in Japanese dictionary publishing and a major post-communist Albanian dictionary project is being pursued in California. It is hardly necessary to examine the long list of bilingual dictionaries of European languages, going back to the Renaissance, to find evidence of the internationalization of lexicography. It has a long tradition.

Our Society became international at its founding in 1977 when a number of foreign scholars chose to join a North American Society specifically devoted to lexicography. Of course, societies devoted to the study of language have existed for a long time and papers on lexicography have occasionally been read at their meetings, but the concentrated emphasis of a special society did not exist prior to that time. Soon thereafter (in 1983) our European counterpart emerged and developed a following similar to ours. The European Society is, however, more strictly European than the American one is North American.

Our international activities consist of biennial meetings, to which not only our international members are invited but those of the counterpart society as well, and the publication of an annual volume of articles, either those read at one of our meetings or specially produced around a theme. Our members also participate in the international meetings of related societies, publish in foreign journals, and serve in various posts as members of publishing firms and editorial boards of journals. Major publishing projects (such as those of the Oxford University Press) have also attracted the assistance of some of our members.

The main difficulty with international activities, when these require the payment of dues or subscriptions, is the complexity of international exchange. Members who have accounts at banks with U.S. affiliation can easily pay by check, and those in possession of international bank cards can equally easily transfer the applicable funds, but others have created endless difficulty by sending us foreign checks or checks in foreign currency, which cost more than the check is worth to cash and deposit. These transactions therefore involve us in time-consuming correspondence and negotiation with banks. And yet other members have no usable currency at all. For these, about a dozen (in China, Eastern Europe and Africa), we have waived dues, an annual loss of $250 to $300.

For a time, we had a closer relation with the counterpart society and collected dues for each other, but the accounting became too complex for those involved in it and the partnership was abandoned. Part of the reason lies in the difference in our structures: EURALEX is in partnership with Oxford Journals, who not only subsidize their quarterly journal, but also handle subscriptions and membership records. Our Society, on the other hand, publishes an annual volume of 200 pages and two newsletters and handles its own records, correspondence, etc. As a result, no fundamental partnership is possible without doing violence to each society’s structure. A more modest attempt to work together is in the planning stage and will soon be proposed.

Lexicographic scholarship has changed over the past two decades (as has all scholarship) as a result of the influence of the new technology. Commercial dictionary publishers have compiled huge corpora of data from which illustrations and definitions are constructed, an outgrowth of linguistic research in universities. Linguistics and especially semantics have deeply influenced the direction of our field. At the superficial level, a social consciousness about the sensitivity of certain groups has altered the nature of definitions and usage labels. At the same time a realization of the widespread use of English in other countries has forced publishers to accommodate to the interests of these non-native speakers of English, a direction easily seen in the pages of Cambridge University Press’s English Journal.

These changes and the consequent internationalization of knowledge have brought the academy back to where it was in the eighteenth century, when the community of learning was without national boundaries, and Benjamin Franklin received the gold medal of the Royal Society as a scientist at the same time as the rulers of England had placed a price on his head as a political revolutionary.