form, and as hardcover or paperback volumes. It is published by SIL International
(henceforth “SIL”), a non-governmental, non-profit organization focusing on issues of
international language development. Other SIL projects include constructing bilingual
dictionaries and other educational materials, developing literacy education programs,
providing health information, and developing computer technologies for minority and
unwritten languages. Many of these projects are undertaken in close cooperation with the
local and national governments of the countries in which they work. SIL is closely
associated with Wycliffe International, a Christian missionary organization dedicated to
translating the Christian Bible into many of the world’s languages.
2.1.1. Background
The Ethnologue was founded by R.S. Pittman in 1951 as an way to communicate with
colleagues in SIL about language development projects. Its first edition was a ten-page
informal (mimeographed) list of 46 language and language group names. As of its
fifteenth edition, it has grown into a 1,269-page volume with over 100 pages of maps. To
speak of the Ethnologue as a print volume is not entirely correct, however, because in
actuality it is a database that is constantly being updated as new information arrives. The
print versions (the paperback is different from the hardcover in that it is bound in two
separate volumes) are just one presentation of the information in the database. The free
web-based version of the Ethnologue is another presentation form of the same database,
and there are yet other presentation forms that are used internally by SIL.
SIL is probably the organization with the largest network of field linguists in the
world. SIL linguists are engaged in research and language development projects in many
regions of the world. SIL projects are probably most densely concentrated in three
regions: Africa, South America and Southeastern Asia/Oceania, but SIL projects are
underway on every continent. SIL field linguists are generally trained professionals, and
typically possess graduate degrees from major US, British and Australian universities. At
different times, SIL has run cooperative training programs with various US universities:
the University of Oklahoma, the University of Oregon, the University of North Dakota
and the University of Texas at Arlington. Many SIL fieldworkers have Masters degrees
or certificates from these programs. SIL presently runs its own Graduate Institute of
Applied Linguistics (GIAL) at its Dallas campus; the GIAL recently received
accreditation as a US institution of higher education. The Ethnologue is in a unique
position to draw upon this extensive network of trained linguists and globally diverse
field experience, in reporting information about the world’s known languages.
From time to time, controversy has erupted about SIL’s status as a Christian
missionary organization, and its close association with Wycliffe International. This status
was reflected in earlier editions of the Ethnologue in the form of a notation on specific
language entries indicating “Bible translation need”; this notation is now no longer
presented in the published versions of the Ethnologue. One source of potential
controversies concerns differences of opinion with some non-missionary academic
anthropologists and linguists regarding the ways academic humanists and social scientists
should interact with the people of other countries and cultures. Some regard the objective
of missionary activity as one of fundamentally changing cultures into the mold of a
dominant culture; hence such action undermines the basic premise of the language
development projects undertaken by missionaries. Other controversies may arise because
SIL operates in countries where both missionary activities and minority rights can be
highly politically sensitive. As a consequence of both types of controversy, in the past
SIL has found it necessary to terminate both language development programs in some
countries and cooperative relationships with some US universities. These sorts of
considerations may influence the way that some academic linguists regard the work of
SIL, including the Ethnologue.
Because of the SIL emphasis on academic linguistics, the Ethnologue’s definition
of language matches fairly closely that used by most linguists. The Ethnologue applies
three criteria in determining if two speech varieties are the same language: (i) if speakers
of the two varieties mutually understand one another then there is strong reason to
consider them the same language, (ii) if speakers of the two varieties do not necessarily
understand one another but share a common literature, then there is still strong reason to
consider them the same language, and (iii) if speakers of two varieties do mutually
understand one another but have different, established ethnolinguistic identities, then
there is strong reason to consider them different languages. Each decision is potentially
reviewed individually, to make a judgment. The greatest danger here is a potential bias
toward splitting ethnolinguistic groups into greater numbers of languages than would be
otherwise recognized; the Ethnologue staff regularly receive inquiries about such
decisions, particularly with respect to varieties of major European languages, such as
Dutch (for recognizing Flemish as distinct), German (for recognizing Bavarian, Kölsch,
Saxon and others as distinct) and Swedish (for recognizing Scanian as distinct). While
these criticisms lead the Ethnologue staff to continually re-evaluate their identifications,
they consider mutual intelligibility to lead to the most linguistically meaningful
distinctions, and hence they regard it as the most important criterion in identifying
distinct languages.
2.1.2. Structure
The print version of the Ethnologue is organized into three main parts, plus introductory
front matter and statistical summaries. Part I, Languages of the World, presents a
comprehensive list of the world’s languages organized under five global regions (Africa,
Americas, Asia, Europe, and Pacific) and individual countries within each region. Some
assignment of countries to regions are inevitably somewhat arbitrary. For example,
Russia spans the Eurasian land mass, but all of its languages, whether located East or
West of the Urals, are listed in its entry under the European region (the maps of Russia
are split between the corresponding Asian and European sections). Indonesia, Malaysia
and the Philippines, are found the section on Asia, rather than the Pacific, which includes
neighboring Australia and New Guinea, as well as New Zealand, Micronesia and the
Polynesian islands. The information in this part corresponds generally to the organization
and scope of the information found on the website under the country entries. The
Ethnologue website (http://www.ethnologue.com/) adds additional functionality by
presenting a page for each individual language entry, making it possible to find all of the