Modersmålsordbogen som grundlag for andre ordbøger

Resumé

This article deals with the Faroese monolingual dictionary, published in 1997. One of the questions discussed is what requirements should be made for a dictionary which is to form the basis of future Faroese bilingual dictionaries. Attention is drawn to the fact that one main condition of a reliable dictionary, viz. the excerpt material is unsatisfactory.
Purism as a principle in lexicography is discussed and criticized, one major disadvantage being that a great deal of the spoken language is excluded.
The strong language normalization work (done in the past) has not comprised loan words and foreign words. As a result, a lot of such words are spelled in different ways.