The UMA brings together lexicography specialists at the 6th Malaga Conference on Dictionaries

The University of Málaga (UMA) celebrated World Dictionary Day on Friday, October 16, with the 6th Malaga Conference on Dictionaries, a meeting held at the Provincial Library of Málaga that was open to students, Philology faculty and the public interested in the world of dictionaries.

The programme was divided into two sessions, morning and afternoon, and included four lectures and two exhibitions. The morning session began with the talk by Gonzalo Ortega Ojeda, from the University of La Laguna and the Academia Canaria de la Lengua, who spoke about usage examples in regional lexicography. Afterwards, Alba López García, from the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, presented a history and typology of onomasiological dictionaries. The morning ended with a visit to the exhibition «Diccionario de mis palabras favoritas», prepared by the students of the Spanish Lexicography course of the Degree in Hispanic Philology. In the afternoon, the exhibition «Diccionarios del siglo XVIII en bibliotecas malagueñas» was opened, commemorating the tercentenary of the publication of the first volume of the Diccionario de autoridades (1726-1739). Next, Margarita Fernández González, from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, gave the talk on the words shared between Murcia and Andalusia in that work, and Estela Pérez Silva, from the University of Cádiz, closed the academic programme with an analysis of the definition of the feminine through the same dictionary.

According to its organisers, the conference sought to recover the entrepreneurial spirit of Malaga lexicography. The city was a benchmark in the writing and study of Spanish lexicographic works, with masters such as Manuel Alvar Ezquerra (1950-2020) and his disciples. From that period came, among others, the Vox dictionaries of the publisher Biblograf, and Málaga hosted the 4th International Congress of the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX 90). Those responsible for the lexicographic content of the Spanish Language degree and master's programmes at the UMA conceived the meeting as an evocation of that impulse, accompanied by an analysis of dictionaries from a historical perspective.

The organising committee was made up of Francisco M. Carriscondo Esquivel, Amina El Founti Zizaoui, Antonia M. Medina Guerra, Engracia Rubio Perea, Narés García Rivero, Álvaro Pastor Hernández-Pinzón and Gema Piedra Guerrero, together with the Biblioteca Pública del Estado-Biblioteca Provincial de Málaga. Xiomara Espartero Ruiz served as organising secretary. The conference was sponsored by the Provincial Library, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the Doctoral Programme in Linguistics, Literature and Translation of the UMA, as well as with the collaboration of the Junta de Andalucía and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.