Jaký slovník uživatelé češtiny potřebují? O Slovníku současné češtiny nakladatelství Lingea

The publication of Lingea’s new Slovník současné češtiny (Dictionary of Contemporary Czech, 2011) has been a long-awaited event in the not-so-long history of Czech lexicography, which was overshadowed by political pressure in the 1980s, when the publication of the second edition of Slovník spisovné češtiny pro školu a veřejnost (Dictionary of Standard Czech for Schools and the Public, 1978, 1994) was not allowed. Consequently, the main generally used source of information on the Czech language became the prescriptive handbook Pravidla českého pravopisu (The Rules of Czech Orthography). The new 30,000-headword dictionary is very well presented graphically and includes many new words (e.g. e-shop), difficult words, colloquial words and slang. The dictionary claims to be corpus-based and briefly mentions its own corpus, however, after more careful examination, we can observe that corpus resources are not systematically used in any form (headword list, ordering of senses, metalanguage of definitions, examples). Moreover, the dictionary draws heavily on the above mentioned Slovník spisovné češtiny with very minor revisions and changes in the wording and maintains the prescriptive tradition, e.g. through the use of added style boxes. Moreover, the dictionary’s overall credibility suffers from the fact that neither its chief editor nor its editorial team members are named.