The first edition of Ethnologue
SIL publishes the first edition of Ethnologue, beginning the catalogue that would become the standard reference for the number of living languages and, through the ISO 639-3 code set for which SIL is registration authority, the identifiers by which languages are named in software and library systems worldwide. Every subsequent count of the world's languages descends from an editorial procedure for deciding where one language ends and another begins, which is why the familiar figure of about seven thousand is a result rather than an observation.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- SIL International (Ethnologue) · institution · United States (Dallas, Texas) · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World
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.
SIL International, Dallas · Partly verified
Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F. and Fennig, C. D. (eds.), Ethnologue: Languages of the World (SIL International), ethnologue.com