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This talk focuses on ‘Mountaineering English’ (MountE), or the variety of English “used by mountaineers in relevant contexts, such as climbing, discussing routes, or writing about mountaineering” (Leuckert 2024: 30). While many expressions used in MountE are represented in general-language dictionaries, lexicographical resources covering the variety more comprehensively are typically produced by mountaineers themselves. Some variation in the use of terms for mountaineering is expected between the US and the UK, but there is also a substantial amount of lexicographical resources from post-colonial countries. In my presentation, I focus on these resources by investigating the following research questions:

(1) Which expressions do online resources of MountE from postcolonial contexts cover, in particular with regard to their semantic category?
(2) How do lexicographical resources of MountE from ‘Inner-Circle’ contexts (e.g., USA, UK, New Zealand) and ‘Outer-Circle’ contexts (e.g., India, Nigeria, Singapore) (Kachru 1985) differ from each other, in particular with regard to the quantity and structure of entries?
(3) Is there a ‘core’ of MountE terms that is shared across countries and, if so, which terms are part of it?

To provide first answers to these questions, I analyse a corpus of online resources of MountE from different countries with regard to the number of headwords and their semantic categories as well as their micro-structure (based on Becker 2016). In addition, distinctly regional terms are then searched for in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) to find out about their propagation across varieties of English.

Overall, the results show that certain MountE expressions are shared across varieties, but several varieties have injected a regional ‘flavour’ into the variety, often with culturally specific terms. However, online resources of MountE are typically very limited in terms of aspects such as linguistic information, with most resources only providing a definition and spelling.

References

Becker, Holger (2016). “Scientific and technical dictionaries; coverage of scientific and technical terms in general dictionaries.” In Philip Durkin, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 393–407.

Kachru, Braj B. (1985). “Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the Outer Circle”. In Randolph Quirk and Henry G. Widdowson, eds., English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11–30.

Leuckert, Sven (2024). “Moving lexicographical mountains for the community: A comparison of print and online resources of Mountaineering English.” International Journal of Lexicography 37(1): 29–49.