Language and Society

The age of printed reference works is coming to an end. The German dictionary market, too, is increasingly moving onto the internet. New providers and traditional publishers are trying to tap the benefits of Web 2.0.

The next edition of the Brockhaus encyclopaedia will probably no longer be published in print. The reason is obvious – and heavy: 70 kilograms of printed knowledge about the world are like lead on the bookshop shelves because the internet has become a free and universally accessible human memory. “Brockhaus has lost the battle against online reference works such as Wikipedia, thereby losing its status as an authority of printed lexical knowledge”, writes the Handelsblatt. The Bibliographisches Institut AG sold the Brockhaus brand to its rival Bertelsmann in early 2009. What Bertelsmann plans to do with it is uncertain.

Visible decline

The situation of language dictionaries is not yet as threatening as that of encyclopaedia. But even publishers such as Duden, Pons and Langenscheidt are feeling the pressure of competition from the internet. While the sales figures of Duden, the market leader in the field of German spelling, remained stable in comparison with the previous year, the 25th edition, which was published in 2009, is much smaller than the previous one of 2006.

In response to Brockhaus’s visible decline, publishers are attempting to flee forward and are not only putting their contents online, but are often doing so free of charge. The dictionary publisher Pons, for example, is putting translation dictionaries for eight European languages on the internet as well as a freely-accessible German spelling dictionary, financed by advertising.

Quasi-monopoly: Duden spelling still chargeable

Since the German spelling reform, the official rules have allowed a number of different spellings in many cases. That is why many people rely on the so-called Duden recommendations, variants suggested by the publisher. Duden charges for this exclusive service through dictionary sales and correction software, but also through its pay-for-use Duden web search. For a monthly fee of 7,95 euro, subscribers have access to 13 specialist dictionaries alongside the German spelling dictionary with its sought-after recommendations.

While Duden can still allow itself to charge a fee for its quasi-monopoly on spelling on the internet, this is hardly possible anymore in the case of other services because many web services have become serious competitors. Leo GmbH, for example, which has developed from a student initiative, has become the market sector leader in online business with its five foreign language dictionaries, with up to 13 million enquiries each day.

Or the Wiktionary, which operates according to the same principle as its big sister Wikipedia, where users write the multilingual dictionary themselves. The dictionary currently has some 45,000 German entries. Academic websites, such as the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities’ Digital Dictionary of the German Language of the 20th Century or the University of Leipzig’s Vocabulary Portal, provide a multitude of authentic examples of the use of words from large text corpora, enabling the meaning and use to be better deduced than through abstract definitions.

Thinking in editorial cycles is obsolete

By their very nature, reference works are never complete, another reason why the future of printed lexicons, encyclopaedia and dictionaries is in question. Matthias Wermke, Head of the Duden Editorial Office, believes that “many people (nowadays) would like to be provided with new and updated dictionaries more quickly than ten or twenty years ago,” and is reacting by producing new editions at ever shorter intervals.

Web-based databases are always a step ahead, however, because they make thinking in editorial cycles obsolete. The latest developments can be integrated into all parts of a reference work on an ongoing basis. Moreover, since innumerable users cooperate on open databases instead of a small group of specialist editors, they are practically unbeatable when it comes to being up-to-date. However, they are not unbeatable when it comes to the contents. While gross mistakes and targeted manipulation are usually discovered and corrected quickly, one can never be sure whether an entry is correct.

Thus, specialist publishers, too, are increasingly attempting to make use of the cooperation of the web community. In the case of Pons, for example, anyone can add to the online dictionaries and the editorial team checks the new entries, making Pons.eu “the first new online dictionary combining brand content and users’ contributions,” according to the publisher.

New ways of collecting entry headers

Duden, too, is experimenting with the Web 2.0. To date it has only done so in the field of youth language, but it has done so consistently in that field. The youth-speak dictionary Szenesprachen-Wiki consists exclusively of users’ contributions. Meanwhile, a printed youth-speak dictionary has been published, a collection of the best online entries. “Users have always influenced the content of Duden dictionaries,” says Matthias Wermke, “but this is not so immediately true of any other dictionary as it is in this project. This is an exciting enterprise that may have an impact on the way we work in future.”