REVITALIZING THE ACEHNESE ARCHAIC LEXICON THROUGH AN ILLUSTRATED CHILDREN'S DICTIONARY

Abstract

The degrading of archaic vocabulary has become one of the most visible indicators of language shift in many regional languages, including Acehnese. Responding to this challenge, this study developed an illustrated dictionary for children as a pedagogical resource to support the preservation and revitalization of the Acehnese archaic lexicon among junior high school students in eastern Aceh. The study adopted a research and development approach adapted from Borg and Gall, beginning with a sociolinguistic inventory of archaic vocabulary, and continuing through dictionary design, expert validation, and user evaluation. Artificial intelligence was employed exclusively to generate culturally contextualized illustrations that enhanced semantic visualization and facilitated learners' comprehension of lexical meanings. The findings reveal a substantial decline in children's knowledge of the documented vocabulary as only 10.9% of the lexical items remained in active use, 42.1% were passively recognized, and 47.1% were unfamiliar to the participants. Expert validation and user evaluation further confirmed that the illustrated children's dictionary enabled learners to interpret unfamiliar words more easily while strengthening connections between language and local cultural knowledge. This study demonstrates that an illustrated children's dictionary can serve as an effective pedagogical instrument for revitalizing endangered regional vocabulary. By combining pedagogical lexicography, multimodal learning, and AI-assisted semantic visualization within a learner-centered framework, the proposed approach extends the role of dictionaries beyond lexical documentation toward active language maintenance and intergenerational cultural transmission.