[EN] Barbara Grimes (Hawaii)
#Editor of Ethnologue: Languages of the World
The Ethnologue is a catalogue of more than 6,700 languages. A paper version and
a CD-ROM are also available.
[Interview 18/08/1998 // Interview 15/01/2000]
*Interview of August 18, 1998
= How did using the Internet change your professional life?
We have found the Internet to be useful, convenient, and supplementary to our
work. Our main use of it is for e-mail. It is a convenient means of making
information more widely available to a wider audience than the printed
Ethnologue provides.
On the other hand, many people in the audience we wish to reach do not have
access to computers, so in some ways the Ethnologue on the Internet reaches a
limited audience who own computers. I am particularly thinking of people in the
so-called "third world".
= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?
Multilingual web pages are more widely useful, but much more costly to maintain.
We have had requests for the Ethnologue in a few other languages, but we do not
have the personnel or funds to do the translation or maintenance, since it is
constantly being updated.
*Interview of January 15, 2000
= Can you tell us about the Ethnologue?
It 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 sociolinguistic and demographic
information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index,
and language maps.
= What exactly is your professional activity?