SIL International (Ethnologue)

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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.