<aside> 💡 Read time: 15 minutes
</aside>
The purpose of this document is to explain how a word entry is distinctly different from a dialectal variations. This document should be treated as a reference that should be reviewed while contributing to the Igbo API database.
Within the Igbo API database we have the concepts of word entries and dialect variations. A word entry is a document that consists of various pieces of metadata. That metadata can include:
Dialectal variations are nested within word entries with the purpose to showcase the dialectal robustness of the word entry, since the headword is usually in Standard Igbo.
As the Igbo API dataset has significantly grown in size throughout the years, we have realized that in order to best catalogue and represent the robustness of the Igbo language, we need to make a clear distinction on what’s considered a word entry vs. dialectal variations.
Since the very beginning of the Igbo API, we made the decision to make the dictionary multidialectal to best represent the robustness of the Igbo language. This decision, although fair and respective of the Igbo language, comes with a price: How do we properly and consistently catalogue and capture all dialects?
This is not an easy task, but is it a possible one.
We made the decision to make all of our headwords as Standard Igbo to establish consistency.
A few reasons why we went with Standard Igbo specifically:
However, we’ve learned that this structure is quite limiting since there are lexically different words that aren’t Standard Igbo but standalone as their own word.
Fortunately, we’ve come up with a solution to determine a word should be a dialectal variation or a separate word entry with two new concepts: sound variations and lexical variations