By Kirk, CBF field personnel

In fifth grade I suffered the crushing blow of being passed over for the star role in our class play about Noah Webster of dictionary fame. That honor went to the new kid, Darren. I was the narrator.  

I would have never imagined then that, decades later, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, I would be working with a group of rice farmers excited to be creating the first-ever dictionary in their language, using technology that would have left Mr. Webster speechless.  
 
In 1995, my wife Suzie and I were commissioned as CBF field personnel as part of a joint project with the Wycliffe Bible Translators. Through a series of “coincidences” God led us to a small unreached people group called the “B” people. The “B” invited us to live in their village, learn their language, and help them develop an alphabet and books for their previously unwritten tongue. And while the B were staunch adherents of their traditional religion, they were open to the idea of translating the world’s bestselling book into their language. 

The roots of the B dictionary project lay in one of the first books—150 pictures of everyday objects with the word written in the new alphabet.  People enjoyed the book—but pointed out that their language had many more words than that! One man reported trying to count all the words he could think of—but he lost track somewhere in the 300s. 
 
In 2004, an anonymous donor gave CBF field personnel worldwide the opportunity to pursue a “dream project.”  By that time, we had contacted B people in two other countries. These diaspora communities had been out of touch with each other since before World War II. It was time for a reunion, and what better way to get reacquainted than a dictionary workshop?   
 
Some 30 B people from three countries thus came together in a national park that would later become famous as the site where the “Wild Boars” soccer team was stranded deep in a flooded cave. Using a series of templates developed by a Wycliffe translator in Africa, they painstakingly wrote out words and example sentences—discovering in the process how their dialects had changed over the years. For example, the word for “father” in one country meant “uncle” in another—good thing to know before translating the Lord’s Prayer! Over three weeks, they collected 16,000 words in four B dialects! That was a lot of paper, and it would take a team of B young people months to type it all into a database. 
 
And there it sat…for years…while the team focused on completing the New Testament in one of the dialects.  

Then COVID hit—travel was restricted, and one of the original B translators (who had just believed!) suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. So he dove into the database—eliminating duplicates, misspellings and non-native words—leaving about 4000 entries— and adding photographs, audio clips and example sentences. A believing Japanese PhD student volunteered her expertise in editing the English renderings and explanations. And we organized yet another dictionary workshop—smaller this time, with about 10 villagers—who were thrilled by the 300-page printout! They broke into teams and read through the entire dictionary, suggesting corrections and additions. 
 
Dictionary making might not appear on most people’s lists of “holy work,” but the excitement on the faces of these dear people touched us. As they marveled as the complexity of the language they had spoken effortlessly since childhood, perhaps they came to value their language and culture a little bit more than before. And we hope and pray that this experience with their words will make them more likely to open the Word—and learn how much God values them.