A milestone in Sinama research has been reached with the publication of the Central Sinama-English Dictionary, making available a wealth of lexical, grammatical, and cultural information on a lesser-researched but important language of the Sulu archipelago in southwestern Philippines.
The collection of words and study of culture was compiled over 60 years, initially capturing a rare snapshot of Sama language and culture in Sulu in the 1960s and 1970s. The dictionary database was expanded in subsequent years through the efforts of contributors and researchers, with each entry containing well chosen, highly idiomatic, and culturally rich example sentences. The local speech community will find it a rich practical resource, as will Philippine university researchers and schoolteachers.
This volume will be of value to Austronesianists, anthropologists, typologists, and theoretical linguists, and lexicographers will be interested in the use of FLEx tools for cross-referencing the web of thesaurus relations.