Interesting article on survey of world languages from NYtimes

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> NYTimes.com <http://www.nytimes.com>

>

> By MICHAEL ERARD

> Published: July 19, 2005

>

> Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium

> of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for

> the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language

> has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer

> than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on

> the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.

>

> Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken

> by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written

> with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in

> Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian

> missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for

> academics and governments, and the occasional game show.

>

> Though its unusual history draws some criticism among secular linguists,

> the Ethnologue is also praised for its breadth. "If I'm teaching field

> methods and a student says I'm a speaker of X, I go look it up in

> Ethnologue," said Tony Woodbury, linguistics chairman at the University

> of Texas. "To locate a language geographically, to locate it in the

> language family it belongs to, Ethnologue is the one-stop place to look."

>

> Yet Ethnologue's most curious fact highlights a quandary that has long

> perplexed linguists: how many languages are spoken on the planet?

>

> Estimates have ranged from 3,000 to 10,000, but Ethnologue confidently

> counts 6,912 languages. Curiously, this edition adds 103 languages to

> the 6,809 that were listed in its 2000 edition - at a time when

> linguists are making dire predictions that hundreds of languages will

> soon become extinct.

>

> "I occasionally note in my comments to the press," said Nicholas Ostler,

> the president of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, "the irony

> that Ethnologue's total count of known languages keeps going up with

> each four-yearly edition, even as we solemnly intone the factoid that a

> language dies out every two weeks."

>

> This dissonance points to a more basic problem. "There's no actual

> number of languages," said Merritt Ruhlen, a linguist at Stanford whose

> own count is "around" 4,580. "It kind of depends on how one defines

> dialects and languages."

>

> The linguists behind the Ethnologue agree that the distinctions can be

> indistinct. "We tend to see languages as basically marbles, and we're

> trying to get all the marbles in our bag and count how many marbles we

> have," said M. Paul Lewis, a linguist who manages the Ethnologue

> database (www.ethnologue.com <http://www.ethnologue.com>) and will edit

> the 16th edition. "Language is a lot more like oatmeal, where there are

> some clearly defined units but it's very fuzzy around the edges."

>

> The Yiddish linguist Max Weinrich once famously said, "A shprakh iz a

> dialekt mit an armey un a flot" (or "a language is a dialect with an

> army and a navy"). To Ethnologue, and to the language research

> organization that produces it, S.I.L. International, a language is a

> dialect that needs its literature, including a Bible.

>

> Based in Dallas, S.I.L. (which stands for Summer Institute of

> Linguistics) trains missionaries to be linguists, sending them to learn

> local languages, design alphabets for unwritten languages and introduce

> literacy. Before they begin translating the Bible, they find out how

> many translations are needed by testing the degree to which speech

> varieties are mutually unintelligible. "The definition of language we

> use in the Ethnologue places a strong emphasis," said Dr. Lewis, "on the

> ability to intercommunicate as the test for splitting or joining."

>

> Thus, the fewer words from Dialect B that a speaker of Dialect A can

> understand, the more likely S.I.L. linguists will say that A and B need

> two Bibles, not one. The entry for the Chadian language of Bernde, for

> example, rates its similarity to its six neighboring languages from 47

> to 73 percent. Above 70 percent, two varieties will typically be called

> dialects of the same language.

>

> However, such tests are not always clear-cut. Unintelligible dialects

> are sometimes combined into one language if they share a literature or

> other cultural heritage. And the reverse can be true, as in the case of

> Danish and Norwegian.

>

> In Guatemala, Ethnologue counts 54 living languages, while other

> linguists, some of them native Mayan speakers, count 18. Yet

> undercounting can be just as political as overcounting.

>

> Colette Grinevald, a specialist in Latin American languages at LumiËre

> University in Lyon, France, notes that the modern Maya political

> movement wants to unite under one language, Kaqkchikel. "They don't want

> that division of their language into 24 languages," she said. "They want

> to create a standard called Kaqkchikel."

>

> Beyond its political implications, the Ethnologue also carries the

> weight of a religious mission. The project was founded by Richard

> Pittman, a missionary who thought other missionaries needed better

> information about which languages lacked a Bible. The first version

> appeared in 1951, 10 mimeographed pages that described 40 languages.

>

> "Hardly anyone knew about the Ethnologue back then," said Barbara

> Grimes, who edited the survey from 1967 to 2000. "It was a good idea,

> but it wasn't very impressive." In 1971, Ms. Grimes and her husband,

> Joseph Grimes, a linguistics professor at Cornell, extended the survey

> from small languages to all languages in the world.

>

> What emerged was just how daunting a global Bible translation project

> was. "In 1950, when we joined S.I.L., we were telling each other, maybe

> there are about 1,000 languages, but nobody really knew," Ms. Grimes

> said. In 1969, Ethnologue listed 4,493 languages; in 1992, the number

> had risen to 6,528 and by 2000 it stood at 6,809.

>

> The number will probably continue to rise - 2,694 languages still need

> to be studied in detail, and in 2000, S.I.L. officials projected that at

> the current rate of work, a complete survey would not be completed until

> 2075. (They now say they are working to speed it up.) As for their goal

> of translating the Bible, Ethnologue's figures show that all or some of

> it is available in 2,422 languages.

>

> Ethnologue lists 414 languages as nearly extinct in 2000, a figure that

> rises to 497 in the new edition.

>

> However, a few linguists accuse the publisher of promoting the trends it

> says it want to prevent. Denny Moore, a linguist with the Goeldi Museum

> in BelÈm, Brazil, said via e-mail: "It is absurd to think of S.I.L. as

> an agency of preservation, when they do just the opposite. Note that

> along with the extermination of native religion, all the ceremonial

> speech forms, songs, music and art associated with the religion

> disappear too."

>

> Dr. Moore, who won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1999 for his 18 years

> of linguistic work in Brazil, adds: "There is no way to resolve this

> contradiction. The only options are fooling yourself about it or not."

>

> S.I.L. officials say missionaries are giving another option to people

> who are already experiencing cultural shift. "The charge of destroying

> cultures has been around for a long time," said Carol Dowsett, a

> spokeswoman for the publisher. "Basically we're interested in people,

> and we're interested in helping them however we can."

>

> Though the Ethnologue is intended to help spread the word of God, it is

> being mined for more secular reasons. Computer companies that are

> developing multilingual software for foreign markets turn to the

> Ethnologue.

>

> "You've got a developer in Silicon Valley, and a person in the field

> calls them and says, 'We need to provide support for Serbian' or some

> language the developer's never heard of, so they can pop open the

> Ethnologue and find out, 'What is this thing?' " says Peter Constable, a

> former S.I.L. linguist who now works at Microsoft.

>

> Ray Gordon, the editor, says producers of "Who Wants to Be a

> Millionaire" once contacted him, and according to Brian Homoleski, the

> manager of the publisher's bookstore, several copies were bought after

> the Sept. 11 attacks by "a U.S. government agency." According to S.I.L.

> staff members, the American Bar Association, the Los Angeles Police

> Department, the New York Olympic Committee and AT&T all called for help.

>

> Ethnologue's newest step toward worldwide influence has been in the

> arcane world of the International Organization of Standards. The survey

> assigns a three-letter code to each language (English is "eng"), and the

> 7,000-plus codes (for living and dead languages) is near acceptance in

> library indexing and multilingual software standards. The codes also

> form the backbone of the Open Language Archives Community, a Web-based

> technical infrastructure.

>

> Most linguists are unfazed at S.I.L.'s affiliations. "If you took away

> all the literature done by the S.I.L. people done in the last 60 years,"

> said Dr. Ruhlen of Stanford, "you'd be taking away a lot of language

> documentation for a lot of languages for which there's nothing at all."

>

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