Folkmun.se: A Study of a User-Generated Dictionary of Swedish

This study examines the Swedish user-generated web dictionary Folkmun.se, encompassing roughly 5,000 entries. Initially a general overview of the website is presented, followed by an analysis of how the content of Folkmun.se has developed, with particular focus on 190 usernames. The contributors can be grouped together based on two distinct factors: 1) by number of contributions, and 2) by the kind of words they prefer to submit. One conclusion of this study is that a great majority of contributors only publish one or two entries. This entails that a large number of users have contributed to the dictionary. Furthermore, a majority chooses to focus on dialect words or slang words. Many of these entries are not represented in traditional Swedish dictionaries. The advantages of having people of different backgrounds and skills working with word collections are obvious, and their work is an important, albeit often neglected, contribution to general linguistics