Ethnologue

The 16th edition of Ethnologue: Languages of the World has just appeared under the general editorship of M. Paul Lewis. The book is a massive attempt to name, classify, and describe all the languages currently spoken in today’s polyglot world. The publisher is SIL International (formerly the Summer Institute for Linguistics), a complex and sometimes controversial organization with its headquarters at the International Linguistics Center in Dallas. Beginning with a mimeographed hand-out in 1951 that focused primarily on indigenous languages in the Third World, Ethnologue has grown in complexity, detail and authority with each successive edition, and the 16th is the most ambitious and comprehensive of them all. Why should political scientists, journalists, governmental policy-makers and entrepreneurs bother with a book on languages? Sadly, many students attempt to analyze political situations without consideration of the complex linguistic realities involved. Language matters, and language about language can be crucial. Reference works on Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, now uniformly claim that the country has three languages, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian (sometimes rendered as Bosniac or Bosniak). Ethnologue would help us understand that these so-called ‘languages’ are all what was once called SerboCroatian and regarded as a single speech community, whose dialects shared almost complete mutual intelligibility. An understanding of linguistic diversity is crucial for administering development aid to poor societies. Helping a deprived but essentially monolingual society such as Haiti is Ethnopolitics, Vol. 9, Nos. 3–4, 425–432, September–November 2010