This is essentially a catalogue/encyclopedia of all the extant languages of the world. It is the labor of the Summer Institute on Linguistics, which takes the business of learning and teaching indigenous languages seriously since it exists to train missionaries to speak the languages of the heathens they go to live among for the purpose, among others, of producing a translation of the Bible into the local tongue (and, where the local speakers have no writing system, throwing one in as part of the bargain). The Summer Institute has a complicated relationship with those doing ethnographic research and indigenous rights advocacy, who generally stand against the cultural imperialism of conversion work but unabashedly reap the benefits of its linguistic trailblazing in many regions such as Central America, where I worked as an undergraduate doing ethnographic research. Here’s the entry for the indigenous language I used to speak, for example.

The Ethnologue also exists in book and CD form, since there are probably still places the SIL goes where there are no broadband connections. [via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools]

The SIL also offers a suite of computerized tools for linguistic field work, which sound very powerful. Perusing this stuff makes me wistful for my fieldwork days (which was before even the days of the laptop; I wonder, by the by, if there have been any anthropological monographs on the impact of the advent of computers and computerized research techniques on the indigenous people anthropologists go to study). I used to say that there had been a natural transition between being an anthropologist and becoming a psychiatrist; that clinical psychiatry is an exploration of the cross-cultural differences between oneself and the neighbors in one’s own culture [and sometimes the ethnopharmacology as well], but it is just not the same. Perhaps I ought to make housecalls, since I loved the fieldwork experience so well.

In any case, here’s SIL’s fascinating-sounding suite of linguistic software tools:

• LinguaLinks Library 5.0:

  Provides information, instructions, training, and advice in a ‘show-and-tell’ mode designed to support fieldwork. Contains the entire contents of 223 journal issues, 149 online books, glossaries, bibliographies, and other reference resources. Includes useful computer applications for language learning and literacy.

• The Linguist’s Shoebox 5.0:

  SIL’s classic language data manager, now with additional features and improved ease-of-use.

• SIL FieldWorks 1.4:

  A suite of software tools to help language teams manage cultural data, with support for complex scripts.

• Speech Tools 2.0:

  A suite of software that enables you to record, store, and analyze language sounds and music, as well as to help you in language learning.

• LinguaLinks Workshops 5.0:

  A world-class tool for managing lexical semantic and text data.

• Language data management and analysis software:

  SIL Language Software 1.0 and the individual subsets include several stand-alone programs. Some are to carry out auxiliary functions. Others are included as supplemental resources for language workers.

• Character sets and fonts:

  Provides generic character sets, language definitions, and keyboard files as well as methods to create encodings for your language definition from one or more existing character sets.

• WordSurv 4.0 for Windows:

  Tool for comparative analysis of word lists to help determine linguistic relationships.