SIL International (Ethnologue)
node · earth
The organisation that publishes Ethnologue, the reference catalogue of the world's living languages, first issued in 1951 and now maintained as a continuously updated database with annual editions. Ethnologue is the source of the figure most often quoted for the number of living languages — commonly given as around seven thousand — and of the three-letter ISO 639-3 codes that identify individual languages in software, libraries and standards worldwide, for which SIL acts as registration authority. The catalogue also carries a graded vitality assessment for each language, which is what turns a list into a measure of endangerment. Its counts should be read as the output of an editorial procedure rather than as observations. Every one of them depends on decisions about where a chain of mutually intelligible varieties is divided into separate languages, and different catalogues applying different criteria to the same speech communities return materially different totals. The organisation's origins in Bible translation are part of its history and are noted here because the coverage and the fieldwork priorities of the catalogue reflect it.
A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.
Read in · 1
Evidence · 1
Timeline
No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.
Connections · 1
- Language deathassesses
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 17 blocks · 1 evidence · 18 related
- Story
- The organisation that publishes Ethnologue, the reference catalogue of the world's living languages, first issued in 1951 and now maintained as a continuously updated database with annual editions. Ethnologue is the source of the figure most often quoted for the number of living languages — commonly given as around seven thousand — and of the three-letter ISO 639-3 codes that identify individual languages in software, libraries and standards worldwide, for which SIL acts as registration authority. The catalogue also carries a graded vitality assessment for each language, which is what turns a list into a measure of endangerment. Its counts should be read as the output of an editorial procedure rather than as observations. Every one of them depends on decisions about where a chain of mutually intelligible varieties is divided into separate languages, and different catalogues applying different criteria to the same speech communities return materially different totals. The organisation's origins in Bible translation are part of its history and are noted here because the coverage and the fieldwork priorities of the catalogue reflect it.
- Knowledge
- Language death
- SIL International (Ethnologue)
- Connections
- Language death
- Glottolog
- The first edition of Ethnologue
- The comparative method
- The language isolate
- SIL International (Ethnologue)
- Sumerian ceases to be a mother tongue
- UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, third edition
- The International Decade of Indigenous Languages
- Evidence
- Supports the existence of a standard catalogue of living languages, its graded vitality assessment and its role as ISO 639-3 registration authority. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No edition number and no language count is quoted; the current figure as of 2026 is unknown to this pack. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.
Observed changes · 0
No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.
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/atlas?object=ORG_SIL_INTERNATIONAL&experience=ORG_SIL_INTERNATIONAL