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This paper presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, the largest survey of dictionary use to date with nearly 10,000 participants in nearly thirty countries. The paper focuses on the comparison of the results of the Slovenian participants with the results of the participants from other European countries. The comparisons are made both with the European averages, and with the results from individual countries, in order to determine in which aspects Slovenian participants share similarities with other dictionary users (and non-users) around Europe, and in which aspects they differ. The findings show that in many ways the Slovenian users are similar to their European counterparts, with some noticeable exceptions, including (much) stronger preference for digital dictionaries over print ones, above-average reliance on other people when dictionary does not contain the relevant information, and the largest difference between the price of a dictionary and the amount willing to spend on it.
In the past two decades, more and more dictionary usage studies have been published, but most of them deal with questions related to what users appreciate about dictionaries, which dictionaries they use and what type of information they need in specific situations — presupposing that users actually consult lexicographic resources. However, language teachers and lecturers in linguistics often have the impression that students do not use enough high-quality dictionaries in their everyday work. With this in mind, we launched an international cooperation project to collect empirical data to evaluate what it is that students actually do while attempting to solve language problems. To this end, we applied a new methodological setting: screen recording in conjunction with a thinking-aloud task. The collected empirical data offers a broad insight into what users really do while they attempt to solve language-related tasks online.
Dictionary usage research is a topic of increasing importance within the field of lexicography. At the beginning of the new millennium, the dictionary user was still relatively unknown. However, in the last ten years, more and more user studies have been published. Consequently, methods, data and the conclusions which can be drawn were successively refined. Also, new possibilities of web-based data collection, e.g., the analysis of log files, enriched this field of research. This contribution aims to describe the state of the art in dictionary usage research in the digital era. I begin by providing a short overview of methodological and terminological basics and then place a special focus on three different methods of collecting empirical data on dictionary use: online questionnaires, eye tracking and the analysis of log-files. All these methods are illustrated on user studies conducted at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim.