Organised Kannada lexicography comes to a standstill 

State government rejects ₹10 crore proposal to revive Kannada lexicography, leaving the language stagnant for over two decades.

The eight-part seminal Kannada-Kannada dictionary published by Kannada Sahitya Parishat, work on which began before Independence, was last revised in 2001. Since then, the dictionary cell in Parishat has been shut down.

A recent proposal by the Parishat to reconstitute the cell and revise the dictionary, for which they sought financial aid of ₹10 crore, was rejected by the State government earlier this year, multiple sources confirmed.

The work on the 9,217-page dictionary began in 1916, and it was published in the 1970s, with a concise edition of 1,450 pages coming out in 1975. “The Parishat had a full-time dictionary cell with full-time employees and editors who were professional lexicographers. It was the only such effort made for a Kannada-Kannada dictionary in the State’s history. By 2003, all the employees in the cell retired, and it was shut down,” said N.S. Sridhar Murthy, convenor, Publication Division, Kannada Sahitya Parishat.

While there have been demands for a permanent institutional setup for Kannada lexicography, many have also argued that it should be removed from the Parishat and entrusted to institutions like the Kannada University, Hampi.

“Two decades is a very long time, during which time thousands of new words have come into use. Lexicography is always a dynamic and continuous process for any language and should not stop. For instance, Oxford Dictionary adds several words to its dictionary every year,” said senior lexicographer T.V. Venkatachala Sastry, who has worked on the Parishat dictionary for years.

In the nearly two-and-a-half-decades since 2001, other efforts have included revising the English-Kannada-Kannada dictionary of Mysore University, another seminal work of historical significance published in 2012, and many individual efforts, such as Prof. G. Venkatasubbaiah’s dictionary of idioms and phrases, cartoonist Panju Gangolli’s dictionary of Kundapura dialect of Kannada, and several dictionaries of technical terms in various fields.

Linguist and recent Sahitya Akademi awardee K.V. Narayana said that while lexicography has to be a continuous process, it is disastrous that organised work on Kannada lexicography stopped at a time when the language is in great flux.