Encyclopedia  |   World Factbook  |   World Flags  |   Reference Tables  |   List of Lists     
   Academic Disciplines  |   Historical Timeline  |   Themed Timelines  |   Biographies  |   How-Tos     
Your Ad Here
Sponsor by The Tattoo Collection


Ethnologue
Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index

Ethnologue

The Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), a Christian linguistic service organization which studies lesser-known languages to provide missionaries for their speakers. It contains statistics for 6,809 languages (2000 edition) and gives the number of speakers, location, dialects, linguistic affiliations, availability of the Bible, etc. It is currently the most comprehensive existing language inventory, along with the Linguasphere Register.

What counts as a language depends on socio-linguistic evaluation: see Dialect.

The Ethnologue provides a three-letter code, called SIL code, for each language it describes, the number of which significantly exceeds those of ISO 639 and RFC 3066.

The Ethnologue is lauded for its neutrality in the area of naming specific languages, due to the fact that it uses a socio-historical, multiple-name scheme that indicates how a language is named by its speakers, how it is named by the government, by foreigners, by neighbors, etc., and how it has been named and referenced historically regardless of which designation is considered official, politically correct, or offensive, or by whom. The neutrality of Ethnologue as a scientific institution is also sometimes disputed, particularly in areas of language classification associated with the Bible and Abrahamic religion.

External link