The Dictionary of South African English

The Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles, which was begun in 1970 by the Dictionary Unit for SA English in Grahamstown, was completed in January, 1995.

Consisting of 4,627 entries, the dictionary reflects the many linguistic influences on English in South Africa, including the Khoisan languages ('Hottentot' and Bushman), Dutch (and later Afrikaans), several Malayo-Indonesian and Indian languages, and African languages such as Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, and Tswana. The text includes citations dating from the late 16th century to 1995. It was edited by Penny Silva (Managing Editor), Wendy Dore, Dotty Mantzel, Colin Muller, and Madeleine Wright, with Edmund Weiner as consultant, and will be published by the Clarendon Press.

The process of transmitting the text to Oxford has been, it is thought, a world first for a text of this size and complexity. As the dictionary had been prepared as a series of WordPerfect files, and the ideal form for the Oxford typesetters is SGML text, it was decided that the dictionary would be converted from the one format to the other before reaching the typesetting stage.

Through the kind offices of Dr Jeffery Triggs, the Director of the North American Reading Programme, the 4,627 entries plus another 4,000 single-line cross-references were ftp'd from Grahamstown to New Jersey in mid-January. Jeffery then created and applied a suite of software programs to the word- processed text, converting it into ascii files while retaining the typesetting information. This information was then converted into tags which indicated the structural elements. After the process has been checked, the files will be ftp'd to the Press in Oxford. The dictionary will appear in late 1995 or early 1996.