WED JUL 20 05

		The Ethnologue. Just so you know ... there are 6,912 languages around the world today ... and that's up from 6,809 five years ago, as reported by Michael Erard in The New York Times (7/19/05). What's kind of strange is that the number of languages keeps going up, even as linguists predict "that hundreds of languages will soon become extinct." In fact, 497 languages are now classified as "near extinct." The explanation for this paradox is that an organization called Summer Institute of Linguistics (S.I.L.), www.sil.org, has made a mission out of researching the world's languages -- and they keep adding new languages to their database. Chances are, the number of known languages will continue to increase, as the institute still has another 2,694 languages left to evaluate for this project, which is known as the Ethnologue. Published both print and online, the Ethnologue was started back in 1951 as a way for missionaries to determine "which languages lacked a Bible." That first edition was just ten pages long and documented some 40 languages. Today, the print edition of the Ethnologue numbers 1,200 pages, and it is of interest to secular types as well. Microsoft, for example, uses the Ethnologue when "developing multilingual software for foreign markets." The producers of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" also have consulted the Ethnologue, as have "the American Bar Association, the Los Angeles Police Department, the New York Olympic Committee and AT&T." Not everyone thinks the Ethnologue is such a great resource though. Denny Moore, a linguist, thinks the project, because it was initiated to spread the Bible, actually does more to destroy language and culture than to preserve it. "It is absurd to think of S.I.L. as an agency of preservation," says Denny, "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." S.I.L. denies destroying any cultures, of course, while others give the group a lot of credit for providing language documentation where otherwise there might be none. Of course, there's not a lot of agreement as to how to define languages versus dialects to begin with, unless you buy into what the Yiddish linguish Max Weinrich said: "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot" (or, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"). The S.I.L.'s standard, meanwhile, is based not on military might but "on the ability to intercommunicate." The S.I.L. figures that any two languages with more than 70 percent similarity are dialects. Not surprisingly, they don't expect the Ethnologue www.ethnologue.com, to be finished until around 2075. Tim Manners, editor