Speakers
Description
This paper describes the development of the New Lakota Dictionary, a corpus-based dictionary of Lakota that, with 48,000 entries, is, to our knowledge, currently the largest dictionary of an Indigenous language of North America. Drawing on more than three decades of lexicographic work, we discuss the methodological and practical challenges of compiling a comprehensive dictionary for a severely endangered, under-resourced, and highly polysynthetic language. Particular attention is given to corpus construction, lexical documentation, collaboration with native-speaker consultants, and editorial decisions concerning lexical categories, argument structure, orthography, and the treatment of derived forms. We also describe the integration of corpus data into both print and electronic editions, lemmatization, valency marking, inflection charts, corpus search, audio recordings, and monolingual Lakota definitions. Beyond documenting the development of a major lexical resource, the paper illustrates how sustained collaboration between native speakers, linguists, and software developers can support both rigorous lexicographic description and long-term language revitalization.