[Summary]
6,909 living languages were cataloged in the 16th edition (2009)
of “The Ethnologue: Languages of the World”, an encyclopedic
reference work freely available on the web since 1996, with a
print book for sale. As stated by Barbara Grimes, its editor from
1971 to 2000, the Ethnologue is “a catalog of the languages of the
world, with information about where they are spoken, an estimate
of the number of speakers, what language family they are in,
alternate names, names of dialects, other socio-linguistic and
demographic information, dates of published Bibles, a name index,
a language family index, and language maps." A core team of
researchers in Dallas, Texas, has been helped by thousands of
linguists gathering and checking information worldwide. A new
edition of the Ethnologue is published approximately every four
years.
***
6,909 living languages were cataloged in the 16th edition (2009)
of “The Ethnologue: Languages of the World”, an encyclopedic
reference work freely available on the web since 1996, with a
print book for sale.
As stated by Barbara Grimes, its editor from 1971 to 2000, the
Ethnologue is “a catalog of the languages of the world, with
information about where they are spoken, an estimate of the number
of speakers, what language family they are in, alternate names,
names of dialects, other socio-linguistic and demographic
information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language
family index, and language maps."
A core team of researchers in Dallas, Texas, has been helped by
thousands of linguists gathering and checking information
worldwide. A new edition of the Ethnologue is published
approximately every four years.
The Ethnologue has been an active research project since 1950. It
was founded by Richard Pittman as a catalog of minority languages,
to share information on language development needs around the
world with his colleagues at SIL International and other language
researchers.
Richard Pittman was the editor of the 1st to 7th editions (1951-
1969).
Barbara Grimes was the editor of the 8th to 14th editions (1971-
2000). In 1971, information was expanded from primarily minority
languages to encompass all known languages of the world. Between
1967 and 1973, Barbara completed an in-depth revision of the
information on Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, and a few
countries of Asia. During her years as editor, the number of
identified languages grew from 4,493 to 6,809. The information
recorded on each language expanded so that the published work more
than tripled in size.
In 2000, Raymond Gordon Jr. became the third editor of the
Ethnologue and produced the 15th edition (2005).
In 2005, Paul Lewis became the editor, responsible for general
oversight and research policy, with Conrad Hurd as managing editor,
responsible for operations and database management, and Raymond
Gordon as senior research editor, leading a team of regional and
language-family focused research editors.
In the Introduction of the 15th edition (2009), the Ethnologue
defines a language as such: "How one chooses to define a language
depends on the purposes one has in identifying that language as
distinct from another. Some base their definition on purely
linguistic grounds. Others recognize that social, cultural, or
political factors must also be taken into account. In addition,
speakers themselves often have their own perspectives on what
makes a particular language uniquely theirs. Those are frequently
related to issues of heritage and identity much more than to the
linguistic features of the language(s) in question."
As explained in the introduction, one feature of the database
since its inception in 1971 has been a system of three-letter
language identifiers (for example “fra” for French), that were
included in the publication itself from the 10th edition (1984)
onwards.
At the invitation of the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) in 2002, SIL International prepared a new
standard that reconciled the complete set of codes used in the
Ethnologue with the codes already in use in the ISO 639-2 standard
(1998), that identified only 400 languages, as well as codes
developed by Linguist List to handle ancient and constructed
languages. Published in 2007, the ISO 639-3 standard provided
three-letter codes for identifying nearly 7,500 languages. SIL
International was named the registration authority for the
inventory of language identifiers, and administers the annual
cycle for changes and updates.