The world's first computer-based dictionary from Chinese to another language, Swedish, is being produced in collaboration with the Apple computer company. Many of the people working at embassies and in the Southeast Asian branches of Swedish companies were educated in the programme for East and Southeast Asian Studies in Lund. The upheavals in Eastern Europe have increased the demand for proficiency in the languages used there, entailing a resurgence for the Department of Slavic Languages, which also offers special courses in the cultural history of Eastern and Central Europe. A Centre for Grammatical Studies Lund has become a grammar centre. The Swedish Academy has concentrated its work on the production of a new grammar of Swedish in the Department of Scandinavian Languages, and a great deal of research into the grammar of written and spoken language is going on at the Departments of English and German.
Computers are an invaluable tool for linguistic research.
The Department of German is working on automatic translation programs. For many years, scholars in the Department of English have been cooperating with colleagues in several countries on the spoken language. An enormous computer-readable corpus of spoken English has been developed in Lund and is being used by institutions throughout the world. Members of the department are also participating in several international projects, including a study of the language of advanced language students and a comparison of English and the Scandinavian languages on the basis of translations and parallel texts. Researchers are interviewing people of different ages at a hundred places all over Sweden and parts of Finland.