Thread for non-linguists: The community of academic #linguists are currently pretty angry at #Ethnologue the world's major registry for languages varieties and information because they are monetizing their data and making access subscription based instead of open.
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#Ethnologue is the registration authority for ISO 693-3, the official system of language codes. ISO codes are used as labels, so that for a book to be registered in a given language it is tagged by the code for that language. Now linguists have to pay to see the data /2.
Ethnologue is an affiliate of the Summer Institute of Linguistics which is itself an affiliate of Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL is a missionary organization that has the basic aim of finding out how many languages need their own Bible, and then translate them.
Indigenous people and anthropologists have long criticized SIL for participating in weakening indigenous cultures through Christian mission, and causing languages to become endangered by collaborating with educational systems that aim to eradicate indigenous languages.
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Furthermore, much of the data in Ethnologue has been contributed by linguists aiming to improve the database. And even more of it has been paid for by tax payers in ccountries where SIL has received government funding, such as Mexico. They now cannot access their own data.
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The short of the long is that we need a new database for the world's languages, that is not based on missionary principles and which is open access.
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Currently glottolog.org is an opensource alternative made by academic linguists, which also has the advantage of having a more linguistically correct classification. It doesn't have information about speaker numbers or locations though.
But most importantly, we need a registration authority for the ISO 639-3 system that is not run by a for profit missionary organization, but by linguists.
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I should mention that SIL linguists have produced a lot of extremely good important documentation for hundreds of endangered languages, and that for some languages it is still all we have. This they do publish open access, as they do with the useful software they have developed.
Also the SIL linguists themselves are not paid by the SIL, but through donations from church congregations.
I am sure that SIL has spent a lot of money running Ethnologue and that they are simply trying to defray some of the costs. But how they are doing it seems problematic.
I am sure that SIL has spent a lot of money running Ethnologue and that they are simply trying to defray some of the costs. But how they are doing it seems problematic.
