The Basic Estonian Dictionary: the first Monolingual L2 learner’s Dictionary of Estonian

This paper is a report on a lexicographical project completed by the Institute of the Estonian Language. The Basic Estonian Dictionary was published in print in March 2014, and the online version will be available by September 2014. The BED is aimed at learners of Estonian as a foreign language or as a second language at the elementary and intermediate levels (A2 to B1) according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The dictionary contains about 5,000 headwords, including single items and multi-word lexical items. The BED provides lexicographical information on pronunciation, morphological information, definitions, word formation, government and collocation patterns, multi-word phrases, semantically related words and usage notes. In the online version, sound recordings (mp3 audio files) are provided. Morphological information was generated automatically. The most frequent government and collocation patterns were analysed and selected using the Sketch Engine corpus query system (Kilgarriff et al. 2004). The BED contains approx. 400 illustrations, study pages and picture pages (e.g. related to animals). In the appendix, geographical names and grammar tables are included. In addition, the Dictionary of the Estonian Sign Language (containing approx. 6,700 video recordings), based on the BED database, was published online in March 2014.