Ethnologue

Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication containing statistics for 6,909 languages in the 16th edition, released in 2009. It gives the number of speakers, location, dialects, linguistic affiliations, availability of the Bible in the language, and so forth. It is currently the most comprehensive and accessible existing language catalog, though some information is dated or spurious. A similar project is the Linguasphere Observatory Register.

The Ethnologue is published by SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies numerous minority languages, to facilitate language development and to work with the speakers of such language communities to translate portions of the Bible in their language.

In 1984, the Ethnologue released a three-letter coding system, called an "SIL code", to identify each language that it describes. This set of codes significantly exceeded the scope of previous standards, e.g., ISO 639-1. The 14th edition, published in 2000, included 7148 language codes which generally did not match the ISO 639-2 codes. In 2002 the Ethnologue was asked to work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to integrate its codes into a draft international standard. The Ethnologue now uses this standard, called ISO 639-3. The 15th edition, which was published in 2005, includes 7299 codes. A 16th edition was released in the middle of 2009.

What counts as a language depends on socio-linguistic evaluation: see Dialect. As the preface says, "Not all scholars share the same set of criteria for what constitutes a 'language' and what features define a 'dialect.'" Ethnologue follows the criteria used by ISO 639-3, which are based primarily on mutual intelligibility.

In addition to choosing a primary name for the language, Ethnologue also gives some of the names by which a language is called by its speakers, by the government, by foreigners and by neighbors, as well as how it has been named and referenced historically, regardless of which designation is considered official, politically correct or offensive or by whom.

William Bright, then editor of Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, wrote of Ethnologue that it "is indispensable for any reference shelf on the languages of the world." (1986:698). According to Ole Stig Andersen on Danmarks Radio, although "Ethnologue has grown to become the world's most complete and authoritative survey of the world's languages," the data has many errors.