Lithuanian Dialect Lexicography at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (against the Background of Selected Polish Regional Dictionaries)
Authors: Sakalauskienė Vilija , Sawaniewska-Mochowa Zofia 
Published: January 2023

The aim of this co-authored article is to provide an overview of contemporary Lithuanian dialect dictionaries in terms of their macro- and microstructure as compared to the concepts of description applied in selected recently published Polish regional dictionaries.
The study considers the following issues in a comparative perspective:

The range of entries (integral or differential, with selection made by lexicographers according to the adopted criteria).
The arrangement of entries (alphabetical, alphabetical-cluster, thematic).
The form of headwords (single- or multi-word).
The way of defining the meaning (descriptive, synonymic, referential).
The choice of textual illustrations and their notation.
The use of grammatical information and the level of its complexity.
The use of lexical maps and other visuals complementing the content of the definitions of headwords.

As discussed, the comparison reveals significant similarities between the concepts of constructing Lithuanian and Polish dialect dictionaries. In both cases lexicographers compile integral dictionaries, which document the entire spoken language of the inhabitants of a given village or area, as well as differentia dictionaries, which focus on dialectal vocabulary. Although there is a preference for the alphabetical arrangement of entries, Polish dialect lexicographers have made some very successful attempts to compile thematic dictionaries (e.g. the ten-volume Dialect Dictionary of the Lublin Region (Słownik gwar Lubelszczyzny)). There are no dictionaries with this type of structure in Lithuanian lexicography.
Lithuanian dialect lexicographic practice is strongly influenced by the pattern of description used in the Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian (Lietuvių kalbos žodynas). This tradition is also the source of the mixed alphabetical-cluster arrangement of entries and the single-word form of the headwords, which are followed by phrases. On the other hand, the ways of defining the meaning in the Polish and Lithuanian dictionaries under discussion are very similar. One novelty in Polish dialect lexicography as compared to the Lithuanian dictionaries is the practice of listing phraseologisms and verbal aspect pairs, or even triads, as separate entries.
The use of grammatical terminology is not at the same level of complexity. The Lithuanian dictionaries include extensive grammatical information, unlike most of the Polish ones, where it is rather selective, apart from those compiled by Józef Kąś, which contain a full range of such data. The Latin grammatical terminology used in the Lithuanian dictionaries may be difficult to understand for non-linguists. The same applies to quotations illustrating the use of particular lexical items: they are provided in a full phonetic form, including the stress marking. In the case of Polish regional dictionaries, the tradition of such notation has been abandoned in favour of semi-phonetic, simplified spelling in order to make them more accessible to non-specialists.
One new feature in Polish dialect lexicography which is worth noting is the visual component: in some dictionaries the definitions of headwords come with lexical maps (e.g. A Dialect Dictionary of the Lublin Region) and illustrations (e.g. the dictionaries compiled by Józef Kąś, which feature visuals of ethnographic value).