NEWS
Two Professors at UoB Document more than Half a Million Words in the Bahraini Colloquial Dialect.. The Project Develops an Electronic Platform to Facilitate Search for Vocabulary of the Bahraini Dialect
Sakhir – University of Bahrain (Ali Al-Sabbagh)
March 2, 2022
Two professors at the University of Bahrain are preparing to launch the “Bahrain Thesaurus” project, which is the first electronic blog of its kind for texts written in the various and diverse Bahraini dialects.
It is expected to launch the thesaurus, which will contain more than half a million words in the spoken Bahraini dialect, in the second half of 2022. The thesaurus is the outcome of the efforts of the two main researchers, namely the Director of the English Language Center at UoB, Dr. Dana Abdullah Abdul Rahim, and the member of the teaching staff in the Department of English at the university, Dr. Latifa Shamsan Yousif. The two researchers have been working on this project since 2016.
Dr. Abdul Rahim stated, “I have thought of the idea of the thesaurus since the time of my PhD study in Canada. I started collecting some data about 12 years ago.” She added, “When I came back to Bahrain, I presented the idea to my colleague, Dr. Latifa Shamsan, who was very enthusiastic for moving forward together in the project.”
Dr. Abdul Rahim noted that she and Dr. Shamsan are both professors of linguistics, and have experiences in this type of scientific studies, whether in Arabic or English.
Regarding the concept of the thesaurus, Dr. Abdul Rahim stated, “The thesaurus is a broad blog of texts written in a specific language or dialect and is available in an electronic form, so that users can search through it for ways to use the word in this language or dialect.”
According to the director of the English Language Center, the project aims to document the Bahraini dialect, and present it in an electronic database to facilitate the research process, which in turn would provide means of modern scientific research for specialists in linguistics and humanities.
She added, “This project is an introduction to providing a comprehensive dictionary of the Bahraini dialect for those wishing to learn about it, study it, publish educational books on it, or otherwise.” She stressed that the project is a trial to keep the Bahraini dialect.
As for the methodology used, Dr. Shamsan stated that the project relied on collecting recordings of Bahraini series and talk shows, and then writing these materials. In addition, conversations published on the Internet in the Bahraini dialect were compiled, based on the methodology introduced by the New York University team in Abu Dhabi for writing colloquial dialects in the Arab world.
Dr. Shamsan pointed out that the thesaurus will be available on a website that includes written texts, and provides search for Bahraini vocabulary in various texts and contexts, similar to other thesauri available on the Internet.
Dr. Shamsan indicated that they got help from students of a linguistics course at the University of Bahrain to transcribe conversations in the colloquial dialect used in television series, folk stories, talk shows, and plays. She added that around 350 students participated in the process of documenting these conversations over five years.
It is expected that programmers and website supervisors will join the project team.
The two researchers hope that this national project will receive support to be available to the public with high tech especially that storing texts and preparing them for research requires great efforts, and employing designers and programmers. They also welcomed contributions of all those interested in popular culture, who are willing to participate in this work.
Several parties have collaborated with the project team, including the Folk Culture magazine in the Kingdom of Bahrain, a full laboratory in the Emirates and some professors of the College of Information Technology, University of Bahrain whom we provided with some texts from the thesaurus for use by college students in their graduation projects.
It is worthy to note that Dr. Dana Abdul-Rahim is a linguistics specialist and a holder of PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada, in 2013, for her thesis “Linguistic structures that include verbs of coming and going in Standard Arabic from the perspective of their uses in language thesauri.” She contributed to different thesaurus, including the global thesaurus of Canadian English, and “Qumar Corpus.”
Dr. Latifa Shaman is an assistant professor of linguistics, University of Bahrain and a holder of PhD in 2012 for her thesis on Bahraini idiomatic expressions. She is currently working on developing “Bahrain Thesaurus”, along with other research in linguistics.
