cross-referenced countries in which that language is found. Part I closes with a
comprehensive bibliography of cited sources, which exists as a separate section of the
website.
Part II, Language Maps, comprises the complete set of language maps. The maps
are produced within SIL by their mapping department using Atlas GIS software and
geographic information provided by Global Mapping International (GMI), a non-
governmental organization providing geographic information services to Christian
ministries worldwide. Details vary in the presentation of individual maps; some maps
merely indicate general locations of languages, others attempt to indicate boundaries of
specific language ranges. Maps of large countries or countries with many languages
(Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria) may be split over many pages, whereas other maps
combine the presentation of two or more neighboring countries. Some countries are
missing from the language maps section entirely: Burundi, India, Mongolia, Pakistan, and
Rwanda are a few that are notably missing.
Part III is a comprehensive index to the Ethnologue for dialect and language
names, and for the ISO 639-3 three-letter language codes that uniquely identify each
language entry. These indexes approximate the cross-referencing functions found on the
Ethnologue website, which is nonetheless a bit more flexible. The website also contains
other information that beyond what is available in the printed volumes. Notably, the
website offers a language family index, from which individual languages can be accessed
via their linguistic classifications. In addition, the language family index is accessible
from each individual language entry, so from a particular language it is possible to
navigate to entries for related language entries. This form of access is much more
difficult in the print version.
Entries in the Ethnologue contain a variety of information, although the same
information is not uniformly available across all entries. A typical country entry begins as
does the entry for Finland below. Following the official name of the country, a total
population figure is given, followed by information about national or official languages,
literacy rates, and population figures for various immigrant language communities. A list
of sources is provided, along with estimates of blind and deaf populations and their
sources, and finally a summary of the number of living and extinct languages for the
entry.
Languages of Finland
Republic of Finland, Suomen Tasavalta. 5,214,512. National or official
languages: Finnish, Swedish. Literacy rate: 100%. Also includes English
(4,500), Northern Kurdish (1,293), Polish, Romanian (1,000), Russian
(10,000), Somali (3,103), Spanish, Standard German, Tatar (1,000), Turkish
(1,000), Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese. Information mainly from M. Stephens
1976; B. Comrie 1987; T. Salminen 1987–1998. Blind population: 3,345.
Deaf population: 8,000 to 307,333 (1986 Gallaudet University). Deaf
institutions: 44. The number of languages listed for Finland is 13. Of those, 12
are living languages and 1 is extinct.
The country entry then continues with individual language entries, such as the one below.
To conserve space and printing costs, these do not include the immigrant languages
which occur in the country entry at the top. It is not always clear what should be treated
as an immigrant language, and what should be granted a proper language entry. Hence,
like in the case of identifying distinct languages, an editorial judgment must be made to
decide which are which. In part, the decision is made on the basis of a “primary country”
for each language. The entry above is a language whose primary country is Finnish.
Entries for a non-primary country indicate a cross-reference to the primary country at the
end of the entry.
Romani, Kalo Finnish [rmf] 5,410 in Finland (2000 WCD). Population total
all countries: 7,002. Ethnic population: 8,000 Gypsies in Finland
(1980). Western and southern. Also spoken in Sweden. Alternate names:
Fíntika Rómma, Gypsy. Dialects: Not inherently intelligible with Traveller
Swedish, Traveller Norwegian, Traveller Danish, or Angloromani.
Classification: Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Central zone,
Romani, Northern
After the language name, a language entry gives the ISO 639-3 code (inside square
brackets), a population estimate for the language entry, a source for the population
estimate, and population estimates for other countries that the language is spoken in.
Following this, a list of alternate names for the language and a list of known dialect
names are provided. This particular language entry closes with the language family
classification of the language (a list of families and sub-families in decreasing order of
inclusivity), but other entries can include information about its lexical similarity to other
languages, its viability, its domains of use, age differences in its use, language attitudes of
its speakers, rates of bilingualism, literacy rates, writing scripts, publications and use in
media, linguistic typology, geological and ecological information, and religious
affiliation. Availability of this information varies, and it is not reported uniformly for all
languages.
Maps show a similar variability to country and language entries. As mentioned
above, some countries do not have individual language maps, though it is not clear what
reason lies behind this. Some maps, such as that of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (the
Maghreb region), merely place labels of language names in general regions of the map.
This presumably reflects the indeterminate ranges of the speakers of these ranges, who in
many cases may be nomadic. As there are relatively few language names to place in these
cases, this sort of arrangement is adequate. Other countries such as Angola have maps
showing approximate boundaries of the ranges of different language groups. Often these
ranges are indicated by placing language name labels directly on the map (e.g. the
Democratic Republic of the Congo), other times there is a numbered key on the map, and
the ranges are identified by number (e.g. Angola, and many other countries). In addition,
on these maps, some form of color coding is generally used to indicate either language
family or sub-family.