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80-403: Ethnologue lists two dialects: Air (Tayərt) and Tanassfarwat (Tamagarast/Taməsgərəst) . Blench (2006) considers these two varieties to be distinct languages. He lists Ingal and Gofat as dialects of Air/Tayərt and Azerori as a dialect of Tamesgrest. Air Tamajeq, as well as other Tuareg languages, has traditionally and recently been written in three orthographies, with one or the other being

160-541: A macrolanguage consisting of two distinct languages, Twi and Fante , whereas Ethnologue considers Twi and Fante to be dialects of a single language (Akan), since they are mutually intelligible. This anomaly resulted because the ISO 639-2 standard has separate codes for Twi and Fante, which have separate literary traditions, and all 639-2 codes for individual languages are automatically part of 639-3, even though 639-3 would not normally assign them separate codes. In 2014, with

240-424: A 2021 review of Ethnologue and Glottolog, linguist Shobhana Chelliah noted that "For better or worse, the impact of the site is indeed considerable. [...] Clearly, the site has influence on the field of linguistics and beyond." She added that she, among other linguists, integrated Ethnologue in her linguistics classes." The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics uses Ethnologue as its primary source for

320-418: A construction-specific property rather than a language-specific property. Many languages show mixed accusative and ergative behaviour (for example: ergative morphology marking the verb arguments, on top of an accusative syntax). Other languages (called " active languages ") have two types of intransitive verbs—some of them ("active verbs") join the subject in the same case as the agent of a transitive verb, and

400-448: A country. From this edition, Ethnologue includes data about first and second languages of refugees , temporary foreign workers and immigrants. In 2021, the 24th edition had 7,139 modern languages, an increase of 22 living languages from the 23rd edition. Editors especially improved data about language shift in this edition. In 2022, the 25th edition listed a total of 7,151 living languages, an increase of 12 living languages from

480-401: A fox in-the woods seen"), Dutch ( Hans vermoedde dat Jan Marie zag leren zwemmen - *"Hans suspected that Jan Marie saw to learn to swim") and Welsh ( Mae 'r gwirio sillafu wedi'i gwblhau - *"Is the checking spelling after its to complete"). In this case, linguists base the typology on the non-analytic tenses (i.e. those sentences in which the verb is not split) or on the position of

560-469: A highly valuable catalogue of the world's languages that "has become the standard reference" and whose "usefulness is hard to overestimate". They concluded that Ethnologue was "truly excellent, highly valuable, and the very best book of its sort available." In a review of Ethnologue 's 2009 edition in Ethnopolitics , Richard O. Collin , professor of politics, noted that " Ethnologue has become

640-453: A language with cases , the classification depends on whether the subject (S) of an intransitive verb has the same case as the agent (A) or the patient (P) of a transitive verb. If a language has no cases, but the word order is AVP or PVA, then a classification may reflect whether the subject of an intransitive verb appears on the same side as the agent or the patient of the transitive verb. Bickel (2011) has argued that alignment should be seen as

720-513: A lot more recently. Latin-derived scripts have been developed and adopted since the 19th century with the arrival of European Christian missionaries, colonial administrators, and linguists. The Latin script for Air Tamajeq is an " Alphabet ". Tuareg languages, including Air Tamajeq, are the only languages that use Tifinagh in its original traditional form. The Traditional Tifinagh script is an " Abjad ", meaning that vowels are not written or shown in any way, neither are geminated consonants . Only in

800-406: A member of this set, while 51% of average languages (19-25) contain at least one member and 69% of large consonant inventories (greater than 25 consonants) contain a member of this set. It is then seen that complex consonants are in proportion to the size of the inventory. Vowels contain a more modest number of phonemes, with the average being 5–6, which 51% of the languages in the survey have. About

880-694: A metered paywall to cover its cost, as it is financially self-sustaining. Users in high-income countries who wanted to refer to more than seven pages of data per month had to buy a paid subscription . The 18th edition released that year included a new section on language policy country by country. In 2016, Ethnologue added date about language planning agencies to the 19th edition. As of 2017, Ethnologue 's 20th edition described 237 language families including 86 language isolates and six typological categories, namely sign languages , creoles , pidgins , mixed languages , constructed languages , and as yet unclassified languages . The early focus of

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960-455: A scientific perspective. He concluded: " Ethnologue is at present still better than any other nonderivative work of the same scope. [It] is an impressively comprehensive catalogue of world languages, and it is far superior to anything else produced prior to 2009. In particular, it is superior by virtue of being explicit." According to Hammarström, as of 2016, Ethnologue and Glottolog are the only global-scale continually maintained inventories of

1040-411: A single dominant order. Though the reason of dominance is sometimes considered an unsolved or unsolvable typological problem, several explanations for the distribution pattern have been proposed. Evolutionary explanations include those by Thomas Givon (1979), who suggests that all languages stem from an SOV language but are evolving into different kinds; and by Derek Bickerton (1981), who argues that

1120-470: A single language depends upon sociolinguistic evaluation by various scholars; as the preface to Ethnologue states, "Not all scholars share the same set of criteria for what constitutes a 'language' and what features define a ' dialect '." The criteria used by Ethnologue are mutual intelligibility and the existence or absence of a common literature or ethnolinguistic identity. The number of languages identified has been steadily increasing, from 5,445 in

1200-582: A standard resource for scholars in the other social sciences: anthropologists, economists, sociologists and, obviously, sociolinguists". According to Collin, Ethnologue is "stronger in languages spoken by indigenous peoples in economically less-developed portions of the world" and "when recent in-depth country-studies have been conducted, information can be very good; unfortunately [...] data are sometimes old". In 2012, linguist Asya Pereltsvaig described Ethnologue as "a reasonably good source of thorough and reliable geographical and demographic information about

1280-525: A team of editors by geographical area who prepare reports to Ethnologue's general editor. These reports combine opinions from SIL area experts and feedback solicited from non-SIL linguists. Editors have to find compromises when opinions differ. Most of SIL's linguists have taken three to four semesters of graduate linguistics courses, and half of them have a master's degree. They're trained by 300 PhD linguists in SIL. The determination of what characteristics define

1360-409: Is a chart showing the breakdown of voicing properties among languages in the aforementioned sample. Languages worldwide also vary in the number of sounds they use. These languages can go from very small phonemic inventories ( Rotokas with six consonants and five vowels) to very large inventories ( !Xóõ with 128 consonants and 28 vowels). An interesting phonological observation found with this data

1440-562: Is a sample text, translation of the Holy Bible , specifically the Gospel of Luke , chapter 1, verses 1 to 4 into Air Tamajeq. Ethnologue Ethnologue: Languages of the World is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It

1520-673: Is accounted for in the ‘Catalogue of the Languages of the Populations We Know’, 1800, by the Spanish Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás . Johann Christoph Adelung collected the first large language sample with the Lord's prayer in almost five hundred languages (posthumous 1817). More developed nineteenth-century comparative works include Franz Bopp 's 'Conjugation System' (1816) and Wilhelm von Humboldt 's ‘On

1600-430: Is by excluding the subject from consideration. It is a well-documented typological feature that languages with a dominant OV order (object before verb), Japanese for example, tend to have postpositions . In contrast, VO languages (verb before object) like English tend to have prepositions as their main adpositional type. Several OV/VO correlations have been uncovered. Several processing explanations were proposed in

1680-425: Is defined by position within a sentence or presence of a preposition. For example, in some languages with bound case markings for nouns, such as Language X, varying degrees of freedom in constituent order are observed. These languages exhibit more flexible word orders, allowing for variations like Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure, as in 'The cat ate the mouse,' and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure, as in 'The mouse

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1760-518: Is listed as a language. In addition to choosing a primary name for a language, Ethnologue provides listings of other name(s) for the language and any dialects that are used by its speakers, government, foreigners and neighbors. Also included are any names that have been commonly referenced historically, regardless of whether a name is considered official, politically correct or offensive; this allows more complete historic research to be done. These lists of names are not necessarily complete. Ethnologue

1840-425: Is seen in most languages or is probable in most languages. Universals, both absolute and statistical can be unrestricted, meaning that they apply to most or all languages without any additional conditions. Conversely, both absolute and statistical universals can be restricted or implicational, meaning that a characteristic will be true on the condition of something else (if Y characteristic is true, then X characteristic

1920-513: Is suggested more recently that the left-right orientation is limited to role-marking connectives ( adpositions and subordinators ), stemming directly from the semantic mapping of the sentence. Since the true correlation pairs in the above table either involve such a connective or, arguably, follow from the canonical order, orientation predicts them without making problematic claims. Another common classification distinguishes nominative–accusative alignment patterns and ergative–absolutive ones. In

2000-452: Is that the larger a consonant inventory a language has, the more likely it is to contain a sound from a defined set of complex consonants (clicks, glottalized consonants, doubly articulated labial-velar stops, lateral fricatives and affricates, uvular and pharyngeal consonants, and dental or alveolar non-sibilant fricatives). Of this list, only about 26% of languages in a survey of over 600 with small inventories (less than 19 consonants) contain

2080-399: Is true). An example of an implicational hierarchy is that dual pronouns are only found in languages with plural pronouns while singular pronouns (or unspecified in terms of number) are found in all languages. The implicational hierarchy is thus singular < plural < dual (etc.). Qualitative typology develops cross-linguistically viable notions or types that provide a framework for

2160-645: The Bible in each language and dialect described, religious affiliations of speakers, a cursory description of revitalization efforts where reported, intelligibility and lexical similarity with other dialects and languages, writing scripts, an estimate of language viability using the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS), and bibliographic resources. Coverage varies depending on languages. For instance, as of 2008, information on word order

2240-499: The World Bank are eligible for free access and there are discounts for libraries and independent researchers. Subscribers are mostly institutions: 40% of the world's top 50 universities subscribe to Ethnologue , and it is also sold to business intelligence firms and Fortune 500 companies. The introduction of the paywall was harshly criticized by the community of linguists who rely on Ethnologue to do their work and cannot afford

2320-425: The 10th edition (in 1984) to 6,909 in the 16th (in 2009), partly due to governments according designation as languages to mutually intelligible varieties and partly due to SIL establishing new Bible translation teams. Ethnologue codes were used as the base to create the new ISO 639-3 international standard. Since 2007, Ethnologue relies only on this standard, administered by SIL International, to determine what

2400-404: The 17th edition, Ethnologue has been published every year, on February 21 , which is International Mother Language Day . Linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology ) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and

2480-543: The 17th edition, Ethnologue introduced a numerical code for language status using a framework called EGIDS (Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) , an elaboration of Fishman's GIDS ( Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale ). It ranks a language from 0 for an international language to 10 for an extinct language , i.e. a language with which no-one retains a sense of ethnic identity. In 2015, SIL's funds decreased and in December 2015, Ethnologue launched

Air Tamajeq language - Misplaced Pages Continue

2560-511: The 1961 conference on language universals at Dobbs Ferry . Speakers included Roman Jakobson , Charles F. Hockett , and Joseph Greenberg who proposed forty-five different types of linguistic universals based on his data sets from thirty languages. Greenberg's findings were mostly known from the nineteenth-century grammarians, but his systematic presentation of them would serve as a model for modern typology. Winfred P. Lehmann introduced Greenbergian typological theory to Indo-European studies in

2640-579: The 1970s. During the twentieth century, typology based on missionary linguistics became centered around SIL International , which today hosts its catalogue of living languages, Ethnologue , as an online database. The Greenbergian or universalist approach is accounted for by the World Atlas of Language Structures , among others. Typology is also done within the frameworks of functional grammar including Functional Discourse Grammar , Role and Reference Grammar , and Systemic Functional Linguistics . During

2720-598: The 1980s and 1990s for the above correlations. They suggest that the brain finds it easier to parse syntactic patterns that are either right or left branching , but not mixed. The most widely held such explanation is John A. Hawkins ' parsing efficiency theory, which argues that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms. Typological tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently, and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Hawkins's processing theory predicts

2800-490: The 24th edition. This edition specifically improved the use of languages in education . In 2023, the 26th edition listed a total of 7,168 living languages, an increase of 17 living languages from the 25th edition. In 2024, the 27th edition listed a total of 7,164 living languages, a decrease of 4 living languages from the 26th edition. In 1986, William Bright , then editor of the journal Language , wrote of Ethnologue that it "is indispensable for any reference shelf on

2880-562: The Bible into their languages. Despite the Christian orientation of its publisher, Ethnologue is not ideologically or theologically biased. Ethnologue includes alternative names and autonyms , the number of L1 and L2 speakers, language prestige , domains of use, literacy rates , locations, dialects, language classification , linguistic affiliations , typology , language maps, country maps, publication and use in media, availability of

2960-666: The Difference in Human Linguistic Structure and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind’ (posthumous 1836). In 1818, August Wilhelm Schlegel made a classification of the world's languages into three types: (i) languages lacking grammatical structure, e.g. Chinese; (ii) agglutinative languages, e.g. Turkish; and (iii) inflectional languages, which can be synthetic like Latin and Ancient Greek, or analytic like French. This idea

3040-454: The English niece and knees . According to a worldwide sample of 637 languages, 62% have the voicing contrast in stops but only 35% have this in fricatives. In the vast majority of those cases, the absence of voicing contrast occurs because there is a lack of voiced fricatives and because all languages have some form of plosive (occlusive) , but there are languages with no fricatives. Below

3120-524: The Ethnologue was on native use (L1) but was gradually expanded to cover L2 use as well. In 2019, Ethnologue disabled trial views and introduced a hard paywall to cover its nearly $ 1 million in annual operating costs (website maintenance, security, researchers, and SIL's 5,000 field linguists). Subscriptions start at $ 480 per person per year, while full access costs $ 2,400 per person per year. Users in low and middle-income countries as defined by

3200-547: The above table but also makes predictions for non-correlation pairs including the order of adjective, demonstrative and numeral in respect with the noun. This theory was based on corpus research and lacks support in psycholinguistic studies. Some languages exhibit regular "inefficient" patterning. These include the VO languages Chinese , with the adpositional phrase before the verb, and Finnish , which has postpositions. But there are few other profoundly exceptional languages. It

3280-486: The actual daily use of the language. The daily spoken language of Sophocles or Cicero might have exhibited a different or much more regular syntax than their written legacy indicates. The below table indicates the distribution of the dominant word order pattern of over 5,000 individual languages and 366 language families. SOV is the most common type in both although much more clearly in the data of language families including isolates . 'NODOM' represents languages without

Air Tamajeq language - Misplaced Pages Continue

3360-547: The auxiliary. German is thus SVO in main clauses and Welsh is VSO (and preposition phrases would go after the infinitive). Many typologists classify both German and Dutch as V2 languages, as the verb invariantly occurs as the second element of a full clause. Some languages allow varying degrees of freedom in their constituent order, posing a problem for their classification within the subject–verb–object schema. Languages with bound case markings for nouns, for example, tend to have more flexible word orders than languages where case

3440-437: The basic order of subject , verb , and direct object in sentences: These labels usually appear abbreviated as "SVO" and so forth, and may be called "typologies" of the languages to which they apply. The most commonly attested word orders are SOV and SVO while the least common orders are those that are object initial with OVS being the least common with only four attested instances. In the 1980s, linguists began to question

3520-512: The cat ate.' To define a basic constituent order type in this case, one generally looks at frequency of different types in declarative affirmative main clauses in pragmatically neutral contexts, preferably with only old referents. Thus, for instance, Russian is widely considered an SVO language, as this is the most frequent constituent order under such conditions—all sorts of variations are possible, though, and occur in texts. In many inflected languages, such as Russian, Latin, and Greek, departures from

3600-415: The common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies. Linguistic typology is contrasted with genealogical linguistics on

3680-475: The date when last fluent speaker of the language died, standardized the age range of language users, and improved the EGIDS estimates. In 2020, the 23rd edition listed 7,117 living languages, an increase of 6 living languages from the 22nd edition. In this edition, Ethnologue expanded its coverage of immigrant languages : previous editions only had full entries for languages considered to be "established" within

3760-466: The default word-orders are permissible but usually imply a shift in focus, an emphasis on the final element, or some special context. In the poetry of these languages, the word order may also shift freely to meet metrical demands. Additionally, freedom of word order may vary within the same language—for example, formal, literary, or archaizing varieties may have different, stricter, or more lenient constituent-order structures than an informal spoken variety of

3840-503: The description and comparison of languages. The main subfields of linguistic typology include the empirical fields of syntactic, phonological and lexical typology. Additionally, theoretical typology aims to explain the empirical findings, especially statistical tendencies or implicational hierarchies. Syntactic typology studies a vast array of grammatical phenomena from the languages of the world. Two well-known issues include dominant order and left-right symmetry. One set of types reflects

3920-424: The dominant orthography in specific contexts. These are Arabic script , Latin script , and Tifinagh (Traditional Tamajeq Tifinagh) script. Tifinagh has been the ancient and traditional script for writing of Tuareg. However, as Tuareg peoples have been a largely oral society, Tifinagh has only been used primarily for games and puzzles, short graffiti and brief messages. Arabic alphabet has come to be adopted with

4000-563: The early years of the twenty-first century, however, the existence of linguistic universals became questioned by linguists proposing evolutionary typology. Quantitative typology deals with the distribution and co-occurrence of structural patterns in the languages of the world. Major types of non-chance distribution include: Linguistic universals are patterns that can be seen cross-linguistically. Universals can either be absolute, meaning that every documented language exhibits this characteristic, or statistical, meaning that this characteristic

4080-724: The existence of a (logical) general or universal grammar underlying all languages were published in the Middle Ages, especially by the Modistae school. At the time, Latin was the model language of linguistics, although transcribing Irish and Icelandic into the Latin alphabet was found problematic. The cross-linguistic dimension of linguistics was established in the Renaissance period. For example, Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones (1544) by Johannes Drosaeus compared French and

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4160-474: The final position do letters a ( ⴰ ), w ( ⵓ ), y ( ⵢ ) serve as vowels in some contexts. Elsewhere, for example among the Imazighen (Berbers) , the modified neo-Tifinagh, which is a full alphabet, is used. The Arabic script is an " Impure Abjad ", meaning that some vowels are written using diacritics and some using actual letters, consonant letters serving as vowels depending on the context. Below

4240-446: The grounds that typology groups languages or their grammatical features based on formal similarities rather than historic descendence. The issue of genealogical relation is however relevant to typology because modern data sets aim to be representative and unbiased. Samples are collected evenly from different language families , emphasizing the importance of lesser-known languages in gaining insight into human language. Speculations of

4320-712: The lack of references, Ethnologue added in 2013 a link on each language to language resources from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) Ethnologue acknowledges that it rarely quotes any source verbatim but cites sources wherever specific statements are directly attributed to them, and corrects missing attributions upon notification. The website provides a list of all of the references cited. In her 2021 review, Shobhana Chelliah noted that Glottolog aims to be better than Ethnologue in language classification and genetic and areal relationships by using linguists' original sources. Starting with

4400-414: The languages of the world". The 2003 International Encyclopedia of Linguistics described Ethnologue as "a comprehensive listing of the world's languages, with genetic classification", and follows Ethnologue's classification. In 2005, linguists Lindsay J. Whaley and Lenore Grenoble considered that Ethnologue "continues to provide the most comprehensive and reliable count of numbers of speakers of

4480-870: The level of endangerment in languages around the world." The US National Science Foundation uses Ethnologue to determine which languages are endangered. According to Hammarström et al., Ethnologue is, as of 2022, one of the three global databases documenting language endangerment with the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger and the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat). The University of Hawaii Kaipuleohone language archive uses Ethnologue 's metadata as well. The World Atlas of Language Structures uses Ethnologue 's genealogical classification. The Rosetta Project uses Ethnologue 's language metadata. In 2005, linguist Harald Hammarström wrote that Ethnologue

4560-488: The list of languages and language maps. According to linguist Suzanne Romaine , Ethnologue is also the leading source for research on language diversity . According to The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society , Ethnologue is "the standard reference source for the listing and enumeration of Endangered Languages, and for all known and "living" languages of the world"." Similarly, linguist David Bradley describes Ethnologue as "the most comprehensive effort to document

4640-649: The only comprehensive sources of information about language populations and that Ethnologue had more specific information. They concluded that: "the language statistics available today in the form of the Ethnologue population counts are already good enough to be useful" According to linguist William Poser , Ethnologue was, as of 2006, the "best single source of information" on language classification. In 2008 linguists Lyle Campbell and Verónica Grondona highly commended Ethnologue in Language . They described it as

4720-543: The original language was SVO, which supports simpler grammar employing word order instead of case markers to differentiate between clausal roles. Universalist explanations include a model by Russell Tomlin (1986) based on three functional principles: (i) animate before inanimate; (ii) theme before comment; and (iii) verb-object bonding. The three-way model roughly predicts the real hierarchy (see table above) assuming no statistical difference between SOV and SVO, and, also, no statistical difference between VOS and OVS. By contrast,

4800-458: The processing efficiency theory of John A. Hawkins (1994) suggests that constituents are ordered from shortest to longest in VO languages, and from longest to shortest in OV languages, giving rise to the attested distribution. This approach relies on the notion that OV languages have heavy subjects, and VO languages have heavy objects, which is disputed. A second major way of syntactic categorization

4880-482: The relevance of geographical distribution of different values for various features of linguistic structure. They may have wanted to discover whether a particular grammatical structure found in one language is likewise found in another language in the same geographic location. Some languages split verbs into an auxiliary and an infinitive or participle and put the subject and/or object between them. For instance, German ( Ich habe einen Fuchs im Wald gesehen - *"I have

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4960-492: The rest ("stative verbs") join the subject in the same case as the patient . Yet other languages behave ergatively only in some contexts (this " split ergativity " is often based on the grammatical person of the arguments or on the tense/aspect of the verb). For example, only some verbs in Georgian behave this way, and, as a rule, only while using the perfective (aorist). Linguistic typology also seeks to identify patterns in

5040-451: The same language. On the other hand, when there is no clear preference under the described conditions, the language is considered to have "flexible constituent order" (a type unto itself). An additional problem is that in languages without living speech communities, such as Latin , Ancient Greek , and Old Church Slavonic , linguists have only written evidence, perhaps written in a poetic, formalizing, or archaic style that mischaracterizes

5120-515: The scope of other existing standards, e.g. ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2 . The 14th edition, published in 2000, included 7,148 language codes. In 2002, Ethnologue was asked to work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to integrate its codes into a draft international standard. Ethnologue codes have then been adopted by ISO as the international standard, ISO 639-3 . The 15th edition of Ethnologue

5200-785: The spread of Islam among Tuareg people from the 7th century onward. Tuareg people, being an integral part of the Trans-Saharan trade , played the most significant role in spreading Islam to indigenous African communities further south, in the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, Tuareg merchant, scholars, and clerics played a significant role in the teaching of the Arabic alphabet and its eventual adoption as part of what's today known as Ajami convention of writing, for writing of languages such as Songhay , Fula , and Hausa . Latin has been used for writing of Air Tamajeqand other Tuareg languages

5280-485: The structure and distribution of sound systems among the world's languages. This is accomplished by surveying and analyzing the relative frequencies of different phonological properties. Exemplary relative frequencies are given below for certain speech sounds formed by obstructing airflow (obstruents) . These relative frequencies show that contrastive voicing commonly occurs with plosives , as in English neat and need , but occurs much more rarely among fricatives , such as

5360-493: The subscription The same year, Ethnologue launched its contributor program to fill gaps and improve accuracy, allowing contributors to submit corrections and additions and to get a complimentary access to the website. Ethnologue 's editors gradually review crowdsourced contributions before publication. As 2019 was the International Year of Indigenous Languages , this edition focused on language loss : it added

5440-590: The three ‘holy languages’, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The approach was expanded by the Port-Royal Grammar (1660) of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot , who added Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic. Nicolas Beauzée 's 1767 book includes examples of English, Swedish, Lappish , Irish, Welsh , Basque , Quechua , and Chinese. The conquest and conversion of the world by Europeans gave rise to 'missionary linguistics' producing first-hand word lists and grammatical descriptions of exotic languages. Such work

5520-544: The world's languages", still they recognize that "individual language surveys may have far more accurate counts for a specific language, but The Ethnologue is unique in bringing together speaker statistics on a global scale". In 2006, computational linguists John C. Paolillo and Anupam Das conducted a systematic evaluation of available information on language populations for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics . They reported that Ethnologue and Linguasphere were

5600-556: The world's languages". She added in 2021 that its maps "are generally fairly accurate although they often depict the linguistic situation as it once was or as someone might imagine it to be but not as it actually is". Linguist George Tucker Childs wrote in 2012 that: " Ethnologue is the most widely referenced source for information on languages of the world", but he added that regarding African languages, "when evaluated against recent field experience [Ethnologue] seems at least out of date". In 2014, Ethnologue admitted that some of its data

5680-656: The world's languages. The main difference is that Ethnologue includes additional information (such as speaker numbers or vitality) but lacks systematic sources for the information given. In contrast, Glottolog provides no language context information but points to primary sources for further data. Contrary to Ethnologue , Glottolog does not run its own surveys, but it uses Ethnologue as one of its primary sources. As of 2019, Hammarström uses Ethnologue in his articles, noting that it "has (unsourced, but) detailed information associated with each speech variety, such as speaker numbers and map location". In response to feedback about

5760-576: Was "the best source that list the non-endangered languages of the world". Lyle Campbell and Russell Barlow also noted that the 2017 edition of Ethnologue "improved [its] classification markedly". They note that Ethnologue 's genealogy is similar to that of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) but different from that of the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) and Glottolog. Linguist Lisa Matthewson commented in 2020 that Ethnologue offers "accurate information about speaker numbers". In

5840-432: Was consistent with specialist views most of the time and was a catalog "of very high absolute value and by far the best of its kind". In 2011, Hammarström created Glottolog in response to the lack of a comprehensive language bibliography, especially in Ethnologue . In 2015, Hammarström reviewed the 16th, 17th, and 18th editions of Ethnologue and described the frequent lack of citations as its only "serious fault" from

5920-645: Was created in 1971 at the University of Oklahoma under a grant from the National Science Foundation . In 1974 the database was moved to Cornell University . Since 2000, the database has been maintained by SIL International in their Dallas headquarters. In 1997 (13th edition), the website became the primary means of access. In 1984, Ethnologue released a three-letter coding system, called an 'SIL code', to identify each language that it described. This set of codes significantly exceeded

6000-623: Was first issued in 1951, and is now published by SIL International , an American evangelical Christian non-profit organization . Ethnologue has been published by SIL Global (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), a Christian linguistic service organization with an international office in Dallas , Texas. The organization studies numerous minority languages to facilitate language development, and to work with speakers of such language communities in translating portions of

6080-422: Was founded in 1951 by Richard S. Pittman and was initially focused on minority languages, to share information on Bible translation needs. The first edition included information on 46 languages. Hand-drawn maps were introduced in the fourth edition (1953). The seventh edition (1969) listed 4,493 languages. In 1971, Ethnologue expanded its coverage to all known languages of the world. Ethnologue database

6160-419: Was later developed by others including August Schleicher , Heymann Steinthal , Franz Misteli, Franz Nicolaus Finck , and Max Müller . The word 'typology' was proposed by Georg von der Gabelentz in his Sprachwissenschaft (1891). Louis Hjelmslev proposed typology as a large-scale empirical-analytical endeavour of comparing grammatical features to uncover the essence of language. Such a project began from

6240-672: Was out-of-date and switched from a four-year publication cycle (in print and online) to yearly online updates. In 2017, Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas described Ethnologue as "the most comprehensive global source list for (mostly oral) languages". According to the 2018 Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics , Ethnologue is a "comprehensive, frequently updated [database] on languages and language families'. According to quantitative linguists Simon Greenhill , Ethnologue offers, as of 2018, "sufficiently accurate reflections of speaker population size". Linguists Lyle Campbell and Kenneth Lee Rehg wrote in 2018 that Ethnologue

6320-562: Was present for 15% of entries while religious affiliations were mentioned for 38% of languages. According to Lyle Campbell "language maps are highly valuable" and most country maps are of high quality and user-friendly. Ethnologue gathers information from SIL's thousands of field linguists , surveys done by linguists and literacy specialists, observations of Bible translators , and crowdsourced contributions. SIL's field linguists use an online collaborative research system to review current data, update it, or request its removal. SIL has

6400-442: Was the first edition to use this standard. This standard is now administered separately from Ethnologue. SIL International is the registration authority for languages names and codes, according to rules established by ISO. Since then Ethnologue relies on the standard to determine what is listed as a language. In only one case, Ethnologue and the ISO standards treat languages slightly differently. ISO 639-3 considers Akan to be

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