Dictionary of SASA

The project Linguistic Research of Contemporary Serbian Literary Language and the Development of the SASA Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian Literary and Vernacular Language is one of the most important and most demanding long-term projects in Serbian scholarship and culture. The SASA Dictionary is in a thesaurus- and academy-type (unabridged) dictionary. It covers literary and vernacular linguistic materials from the entire area of the Stokavian dialect, spanning the period from the times of Dositej Obradović and Vuk Karadžić to the present day. The original initiative for compiling the Dictionary came from Stojan Novaković. In order to deal with this undertaking, the Lexicographic Department was established at the Academy. In 1947, it grew into the Institute for the Serbian Language. The first volume of the Dictionary was published in 1959. Nineteen volumes have been published so far. Once completed, the Dictionary will have more than 35 volumes with about 500,000 entries.

Along with practical lexicography (compiling the dictionary of the Serbian literary language, terminological and dialectal dictionaries, writers’ dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, etc.), project associates also deal with theoretical lexicography and lexicology, as well as with other areas of Serbian language studies.

The digitization of linguistic materials for the SASA Dictionary has been undertaken as part of the project.