What is the Ethnologue?
History — The Ethnologue is a catalog of the world's languages. It was started in 1951 by Richard Pittman and had only 46
languages on 10 pages. The vision for this tool quickly grew to encompass the need for a comprehensive and robust worldwide
catalog of all the world's languages. The fifth edition (1958) was large enough to be printed as a book and by the seventh
edition (1969) the Ethnologue provided information on 4,493 languages. The discovery and cataloging of languages continued
and by the year 2000 there were 6,809 languages in the catalog. Today there are nearly 7,100 languages listed in the 21st
edition. Read more on the history of the Ethnologue
at the website.
Advocacy — At the heart of the Ethnologue is a desire to promote prayer for the people who speak languages which do not
yet have God's Word in their heart language. Many minority languages do not have an alphabet, so these people, being illiterate
in their heart language, are starting from zero. They need prayer as a foundation for the task of translating the Bible into
their language. Prayer was the motivation back in 1951 and continues to be the primary motivation for keeping the data
as accurate, complete and up to date as possible. The Ethnologue is used by Christian organizations to decide where to put
personnel and resources for efforts in literacy and Bible Translation. It is also used by secular institutions and
organizations to determine where language development resources should go and where research efforts may be warranted.
See below for more on this.
Who uses the Ethnologue? And how do they use it?
The Ethnologue has been an important scholarly work and reference book since its beginning. It is recognized as the
foremost authority on the world's languages and as such is used by many people and organizations around the world to make
decisions for projects related to language development. Here are some examples.
- A government education policy maker might decide whether to fund the production of educational materials in a
minority language based on information listed in the Ethnologue.
- A development agency determines where to put its language development efforts based on languages listed in the
Ethnologue.
- The Joshua Project uses the Ethnologue to determine their people group
listings (view Lampung Abung) and to gather the
information that goes into those people group profiles.
- Wycliffe and other mission agencies use the Ethnologue to plan new projects and
assign personnel to them.
- Many university professors, scholars and students use the Ethnologue in their research on languages and very often
give back to the Ethnologue by sharing the results of their research with the Ethnologue.
- Someone from a large company that creates multilingual software, like Microsoft, uses the Ethnologue to determine
where they should put their efforts at creating translations for their software. They will look for large languages
that are used in education or government.
- Many people also use the Ethnologue for school projects or before they travel to a country to learn about the people
and languages in that country.
What information does the Ethnologue record and track?
A language entry in the Ethnologue contains over a dozen fields of data. Some languages have more and
some less depending on how much is known about the language. The information includes:
- Language name
- Primary country in which the language is spoken
- ISO 639-3 code, a unique 3 letter code for each language
- Alternate names
- Population in all countries spoken in
- Language maps showing where the language is spoken
- Location of the language including provinces and areas within the country
- Language status or the vitality of the language, ie. is it diminishing or thriving
- Linguistic classification or language family
- Dialects including description of percent similarity between dialects
- Typology - word order of the language; phonological, morphological or syntactic features of interest
- Language use - how the language is used and what other languages are used around the language
- Language development - literacy rates, publications or scripture in the language
- Language resources link to the Online Language Archives Community
(view English)
- Writing, script(s) the language is written in
- Other comments - often related but not limited to the religion of the speakers
The Ethnologue is published as a book and in the website form seen above. The book form is over 1500 pages and takes much work
to produce. Many previous editions of the book may be purchased through Amazon as well as
the current edition. In addition to the book the Ethnologue can be purchased in more bite size country reports. These are
available in pdf format and include language entries and relevant maps. These are found on any country page on the
website. The 21st edition of the Ethnologue includes 233 language maps which may be purchased and downloaded from the
website as well. The Ethnologue editors are continually working on creating new products as they become aware of needs
in the market.