Iraqi Dictionary

The Iraqi dialect dictionary is, as of the writing of this, one of the newest dictionaries to be added. I actually started it in 2013, but had to shelve because of lack of time. I was surprised, when starting on it, how hard it was to find material. A few textbooks had come out since the US invaded Iraq in 2003, but not much besides that. A few older sources, such as the Defense Language Institute’s old textbook, were also available. The Arabic resources I found, themselves quite scarce, did not lend themselves to non-native speakers of the dialect, often lacking harakat and context and not being clear unless one already was familiar with what was being explained. I fortunately had some Iraqi friends who helped and had received a small amount of funding that I used to pay native speakers. When working on this dictionary, I also developed new methods to improve the process of merging data sets faster, which opened the doors to a number of possibilities to build dictionaries faster.