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The paper reports on a dictionary of German loanwords in the languages of the South Pacific that is compiled at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. The loanwords described in this dictionary mainly result from language contact between 1884 and 1914, when the German empire was in possession of large areas of the South Pacific where overall more than 700 indigenous languages were spoken. The dictionary is designed as an electronic XML-based resource from which an internet dictionary and a printed dictionary can be derived. Its printed version is intended as an ‘inverted loanword dictionary’, that is, a dictionary that – in contrast to the usual praxis in loanword lexicography – lemmatizes the words of a source language that have been borrowed by other languages. Each of the loanwords will be described with respect to its form and meaning and the contact situation in which it was borrowed. Among the outer texts of the dictionary are (i) a list of all sources with bibliographic and archival information, (ii) a commentary on each source, (iii) a short history of the language contact with German for each target language, and perhaps (iv) facsimiles of source texts.The dictionary is supposed to (i) help to reconstruct the history of language contact of the source language, (ii) provide evidence for the cultural contact between the populations speaking the source and the target languages, (iii) enable linguistic theories about the systematic changes of the semantic, morphosyntactic, or phonological lexical properties of the source language when its words are borrowed into genetically and typologically different languages, and (iv) establish a thoroughly described case for testing typological theories of borrowing.
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