= Quote

Caoimhin O Donnaile has taught computing ­ through the Gaelic language ­ at the Institute Sabhal Mor Ostaig, on the Island of Skye, in Scotland.  He has also maintained the bilingual (English, Gaelic) college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic.  He wrote in May 2001:  “Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, a Gaelic online terminology database.  There are more hits on our website.  There is more use of sound.  Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet.  A major project has been the translation of the Opera web browser into Gaelic ­ the first software of this size available in Gaelic.”

= The Ethnologue

Published by sil International (sil was initially known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), “The Ethnologue:  Languages of the World” is an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages.  The 16th edition was published in 2009, in print and on the web.  The Ethnologue has been an active research project for more than fifty years.  Thousands of linguists have contributed to the Ethnologue worldwide.  A new edition is published approximately every four years.

The Ethnologue was founded in 1951 by Richard Pittman, who was motivated by the desire to share information on language development needs around the world with his colleagues at sil International as well as with other language researchers.  Richard Pittman was the editor of the 1st to 7th editions (1951-1969).

Barbara Grimes was the editor of the 8th to 14th editions (1971-2000).  She wrote in January 2000:  “It is a catalog of the languages of the world, with information about where they are spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers, what language family they are in, alternate names, names of dialects, other socio-linguistic and demographic information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index, and language maps.”  In 1971, information was expanded from primarily minority languages to encompass all known languages of the world.  Between 1967 and 1973, she completed an in-depth revision of the information on Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, and a few countries of Asia.  During her years as editor, the number of identified languages grew from 4,493 to 6,809.  The information recorded on each language expanded so that the published work more than tripled in size.

In 2000, Raymond Gordon Jr. became the third editor of the Ethnologue and produced the 15th edition (2005).  Shortly after the publication of the 15th edition, Paul Lewis became the editor, responsible for general oversight and research policy.  He installed Conrad Hurd as managing editor, responsible for operations and database management, and Raymond Gordon as senior research editor, leading a team of regional and language-family focused research editors.

In the Introduction of its latest edition (16th edition, 2009), the Ethnologue defines a language as such:  “How one chooses to define a language depends on the purposes one has in identifying that language as distinct from another.  Some base their definition on purely linguistic grounds.  Others recognize that social, cultural, or political factors must also be taken into account.  In addition, speakers themselves often have their own perspectives on what makes a particular language uniquely theirs.  Those are frequently related to issues of heritage and identity much more than to the linguistic features of the language(s) in question.”

As explained in the Introduction, one feature of the database since its inception has been a system of three-letter language identifiers, that appeared in the publication itself from the 10th edition (1984) onwards.  “In 1998, the International Organization for Standardization (iso) adopted iso 639-2, a standard for three-letter language identifiers.  The standard is based on a convergence of iso 639-1 (an earlier standard for two-letter language identifiers adopted in 1988) and of ANSI Z39.53 (also known as the Marc language codes, a set of three-letter identifiers developed within the library community and adopted as an American National Standard in 1987).  The iso 639-2 standard was insufficient for many purposes since it has identifiers for fewer than 400 individual languages.  Thus in 2002, iso TC37/SC2 formally invited sil International to prepare a new standard that would reconcile the complete set of codes used in the Ethnologue with the codes already in use in the earlier iso standard.  In addition, codes developed by Linguist List to handle ancient and constructed languages were to be incorporated.  The result, which was officially approved by the subscribing national standards bodies in 2006 and published in 2007, is a standard named iso 639-3 that provides standardized three-letter codes for identifying nearly 7,500 languages (iso 2007).  Sil International was named as the registration authority for the iso 639-3 standard inventory of language identifiers and administers the annual cycle for changes and updates.  This edition of Ethnologue is the second to use the iso 639-3 language identifiers.  In the fifteenth edition they had the status of Draft International Standard.  In this edition they are based on the standard as originally adopted plus the 2006 series of adopted change requests (released August 2007) and the 2007 series of adopted change requests (released January 2008).  Information about the iso 639-3 standard and procedures for requesting additions, deletions, and other modifications to the iso 639-3 inventory of identified languages can be found at the iso 639-3 website:  http://www.sil.org/iso639-3.”

= Experiences

Caoimhin O Donnaile has taught computing through the Gaelic language - at the Institute Sabhal Mor Ostaig, on the Island of Skye, in Scotland.  He has also maintained the bilingual (English, Gaelic) college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic, as well as the bilingual webpage European Minority Languages, a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family.  He wrote in May 2001:  “There has been a great expansion in the use of information technology in our college.  Far more computers, more computing staff, flat screens.  Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, and a Gaelic online terminology database.  There are more hits on our website.  There is more use of sound.  Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet.  A major project has been the translation of the Opera web browser into Gaelic ­ the first software of this size available in Gaelic.”

How about the internet and endangered languages?  “I would emphasize the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the internet speeds everything up.  If people don’t care about preserving languages, the internet and accompanying globalization will greatly speed their demise.  If people do care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous help.”

Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haïti, a reference website about Haitian culture.  He wrote in November 1999:  “In Windows on Haïti, the primary language of the site is English, but one will equally find a center of lively discussion conducted in ‘Kreyol’.  In addition, one will find documents related to Haïti in French, in the old colonial Creole, and I am open to publishing others in Spanish and other languages.  I do not offer any sort of translation, but multilingualism is alive and well at the site, and I predict that this will increasingly become the norm throughout the web.”

Guy added in June 2001:  “Kreyol is the only national language of Haïti, and one of its two official languages, the other being French.  It is hardly a minority language in the Caribbean context, since it is spoken by eight to ten million people. (...) I have taken the promotion of Kreyol as a personal cause, since that language is the strongest of bonds uniting all Haitians, in spite of a small but disproportionately influential Haitian élite’s disdainful attitude to adopting standards for the writing of Kreyol and supporting the publication of books and official communications in that language.  For instance, there was recently a two-week book event in Haiti’s Capital and it was promoted as ‘Livres en Folie’ (’A mad feast for books’).  Some 500 books from Haitian authors were on display, among which one could find perhaps 20 written in Kreyol.  This is within the context of France’s major push to celebrate Francophony among its former colonies.  This plays rather well in Haïti, but directly at the expense of Creolophony.  What I have created in response to those attitudes are two discussion forums on my website, Windows on Haïti, held exclusively in Kreyol.  One is for general discussions on just about everything but obviously more focused on Haiti’s current socio-political problems.  The other is reserved only to debates of writing standards for Kreyol.  Those debates have been quite spirited and have met with the participation of a number of linguistic experts.  The uniqueness of these forums is their non-academic nature.”

Robert Beard, co-founder of the yourDictionary.com portal, wrote in January 2000:  “While English still dominates the web, the growth of monolingual non-English websites is gaining strength with the various solutions to the font problems.  Languages that are endangered are primarily languages without writing systems at all (only 1/3 of the world’s 6,000+ languages have writing systems).  I still do not see the web contributing to the loss of language identity and still suspect it may, in the long run, contribute to strengthening it.  More and more Native Americans, for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to write grammars of their language and help them put up dictionaries.  For these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural expression.”