(March 2017) In the town of Thionck-Essyl in the south of Senegal, speakers of the *Gusilay language are celebrating the success of the recent Rapid Word Collection (RWC) workshop, an updated approach to jump-starting the making of a dictionary. The workshop was publicized on the local radio station, including interviews of participants who voiced the importance of their collective work. The broadcast resulted in a room full of Gusilay speakers at the closing ceremony, ready to join the celebration.

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(October 2016) Congratulations to the compilers of six dictionaries newly-published this year on Webonary.org from July through September.

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(March 2016) As of 1 March, fifty-six dictionaries are now available on SIL’s Webonary. Newly published are Burkina Faso Kusaal Dictionary, Dictionnaire Mbule and Dictionnaire Moore. This online resource gives minority language groups the ability to publish bilingual or multilingual dictionaries on the web with a minimum of technical help. SIL is aiming to publish 100 dictionaries on Webonary by 1 October 2016.

Rapid Word Collection (RWC) workshops are a significant method of helping speakers of ethnolinguistic languages to create their own dictionaries. The RWC method revolutionizes the task of collecting words by using a systematic method to capture these words in a workshop organized in the language community. RWC workshops consistently achieve a total of 12,000 or more raw entries during a brief two-week period.

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(January 2016) SIL’s focus this year at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) conference was on the services SIL provides to the linguistics community. Several SIL linguists attended the 90^th Annual Meeting of the LSA which was held 7-10 January in Washington, D.C. As part of its on-going involvement in cutting-edge linguistics, SIL has a long history of participation with the LSA.

Verna Stutzman, coordinator of SIL’s Dictionary & Lexicography Services team, demonstrated another service, the online Webonary, a repository where people can post dictionaries, in whatever stage of development they exist.

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(November 2015) Dictionaries provide a long list of benefits: a resource for students who want to know the meaning of an unfamiliar word, a reference for writers, a guide to standard spelling and a reference for the community’s traditional knowledge of local plants and animals. A dictionary can bolster a community’s pride in its language and compiling the words and definitions provides a tangible goal for mother-tongue speakers to work toward together. SIL’s Dictionary and Lexicography Services team is dedicated to supporting language communities around the world as they develop dictionaries for their languages.

Read the full article at sil.org.