Pilbara language dictionaries – free, interactive and downloadable

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Wow! Sally Dixon has just pointed me to Wangka Maya (the Pilbara Language Centre)’s free downloadable interactive Pilbara language dictionaries for the following languages: Bayungu, Burduna, Jiwarli, Martu Wangka, Nyamal, Nyangumarta, Thalanyji, Warnman, and Yulparija.
“These may be downloaded and used for personal use at no cost.”
What a fantastic resource! And what a good way of ensuring that the material isn’t lost.
Lucky PC users, unlucky Mac users – they’re made in Lexique Pro, and so they run under Windows only. Off to the Windows emulator sigh.., as the LP people say firmly that they have NO plans to make Mac or Linux versions.


Copies of these dictionaries on disc are available at Wangka Maya for $30 each.
wangkamaya AT kisser.net.au
Mailing Address:
PO BOX 2736
South Hedland WA 6722
Phone Number: (outside Australia) +61 8 9172 2344
Fax Number: +61 8 9172 2355

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7 thoughts on “Pilbara language dictionaries – free, interactive and downloadable”

  1. Note that the language name Bayungu is misspelled on the download page that Jane linked to.
    I would strongly encourage users to read the description of the form and content of each dictionary under the “About XXX Dictionary” tab once they have installed each LexiquePro dictionary, especially the information about “Acknowledgements and Copyright”. Several of the dictionaries are reworkings of material previously published by other scholars, eg. the content of the Jiwarli dictionary derives entirely from my 1992 book with changes to the spelling and addition of semantic domain labels. This is made clear under the “Acknowledgements and Copyright”.
    As for Mac users, LexiquePro can produce quite reasonable HTML so that a website for each dictionary could easily be generated. It is not clear to me why Wangka Maya chose to distribute the materials as executable Windows files rather than publishing them directly on the web.

  2. Downloaders should also note that the version of LexiquePro installed by running these .exe files is 2.8.3.228 which dates from March 2008. The current version, available here, is 2.8.6 which fixes a number of bugs in the earlier version.

  3. I can attest that Lexique Pro installs without any problems (read: with only a couple of minor problems) in Linux under the Wine Windows emulator. I’ve just installed the Bayungu dictionary and it runs fine. I’m now downloading the rest.

  4. Thanks for that Peter, the spelling mistake has been corrected.
    We’d love to look at directly publishing the dictionaries on the web. We’d already made the Lexique Pro dictionaries for schools up here (where it’s still a PC world!) so it was an easy step to put them on the website where they can be accessed by language teachers and speakers for free.
    We’re keen to explore any means of making language resources more accessible to speakers, especially since we’re all becoming more confident using our re-launched website. If anyone would like to help us out with the technical side of putting them directly on the web we’d love to hear from you!!

  7. If he so desires, Mr Parker can already generate his rubbish books by simply downloading the existing LexiquePro files and exporting the data as rtf or txt files. Making the dictionaries available as HTML won’t change the possibility that someone could misuse the materials Wangka Maya has produced.

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