organizationLinguistics & Language Documentation / Nonprofit ResearchUnited States

Ethnologue (SIL International)

The world's most comprehensive catalogue of living languages, published by SIL Global since 1951.

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is an annual reference publication—available in print and online—that catalogs statistics and information on all known living languages. First issued in 1951 and now in its 28th edition (2025), it lists 7,159 living languages and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive source of its kind. Hundreds of linguists and researchers around the world contribute to and rely on the database.

Ethnologue is published by SIL Global (formerly SIL International / Summer Institute of Linguistics International), an American evangelical Christian nonprofit headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Founded in 1934 by William Cameron Townsend, SIL's mission centers on studying, documenting, and developing languages—especially lesser-known ones—to promote literacy, support minority language communities, and translate the Christian Bible. SIL has been an official NGO partner with UNESCO since 1993.

Today, SIL Global operates at significant scale, with more than 4,000 staff and volunteers serving 855 million people across 1,466 language communities in 109 countries. The organization also pioneers language standards work: Ethnologue developed and championed the ISO 639-3 standard for language identification codes, now widely used across technology, publishing, and international institutions.

An innovation in language documentation, natural language processing, or multilingual data infrastructure would be directly relevant to Ethnologue and SIL Global, given their role as the authoritative global reference for language data and their active field linguistics and software development programs.

Ideas that could help Ethnologue (SIL International)

Dialect Evolution Mapping Platform
A digital tool that overlays modern acceptability-judgment survey data onto historical linguistic atlas records (like the AIS) to visualize how regional dialect grammar has shifted over decades, pinpointing where dialects have converged toward a standard language, diverged, or changed independently.
Why it helps: Ethnologue tracks vitality and change for thousands of languages and dialects; a platform that operationalizes diachronic grammatical shift would enhance the empirical basis for its vitality classifications.