Ethnologue.com home
Ethnologue > Bibliography > Introduction

About the SIL Bibliography

What is the SIL Bibliography?

The SIL Bibliography records works authored or edited by members of SIL International or produced by a publishing unit of SIL. It contains over 18,500 references to books, journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, and other academic papers about languages and cultures. The Bibliography also has about 11,500 references for materials written in the languages we study, such as literacy books, instructional books on other basic education topics (health, math, social studies), story and folk tale books, and translated works. In 1992 this bibliography was published in paper format, and in 1997 a portion of the bibliography was made available on the Internet for the first time. The vast majority of works are published, but there are a growing number of manuscript works listed here, many of which supplement research reported in publications also listed here.

The materials in the Bibliography date from 1935 (right around the time that SIL was being organized) to the present. New entries are continually added to Bibliography; this web version is updated at least once a month.

The SIL Bibliography is not a general database on linguistics, anthropology, translation, or literacy (the main fields in which SIL works), but rather, it is a record of the contributions SIL members have made in these areas of academic study, and in assistance to speakers of minority languages around the world. There are also citations for papers that were not written by SIL members, but were published by SIL.

Some frequently asked questions about the SIL Bibliography

Why do some special characters not display properly?

A Unicode font is required to display some of the special characters in the SIL Bibliography, especially vernacular publications titles. Go to the citation listing for Cameroon. If several of the characters look like little boxes, your browser is not using Unicode to display the page. To see the characters correctly:

There may remain a few characters not displayed properly, but the majority should render correctly.

How is the Bibliography organized?

The Bibliography has basic citation information, and indexes for authors, subject area, language of interest, country of interest, and series. We expect to add an index of language of text, as we have academic works written in several of the world's major languages.

What ways can I search the Bibliography?

To search by language, just search the Ethnologue directly and you will get relevant citations to publications. There are also indexes for Country, Subject, and Author. In addition, you can search by keyword in the Title, Serial (journal name or book series name), Country, Subject, and Author, and you can limit by year.

How can I get a copy of something I find listed in the Bibliography?

For many recent SIL publications, look for a link button to take you to our Publications Catalog to purchase a copy, either in paper or an electronic copy. The publisher also has some recent back issues of SIL journals. Sometimes publications are supplied by an overseas branch office; such orders will take extra time. Out-of-print SIL publications can be obtained by special order from the SIL Language and Culture Archives (6–8 weeks for delivery within North America, in most cases). The Archives supplies the document, and SIL International Publications ships the order and receives payment. With so many possibilities, it can get confusing, so if you don't see a link to the Publications Catalog as a part of the publication record, contact the anyway, and include the Entry number(s). The Archives can supply publications for which SIL International holds copyright. However, many of the items listed in the Bibliography are published by other publishers, who usually hold the copyrights to those publications. Look for these items at a university library or request these items via interlibrary loan through your university or public library, or purchase them at a bookstore or through a document supplier (there are many on the web).

May I use your references in my own bibliography?

You are welcome to copy this information into your own personal bibliographic database. If you wish to republish citations from this database in another database on the Internet or any other medium, we request that you also include as an element or field in the citation the URL for the corresponding citation in our SIL Bibliography. The format for this link is www.ethnologue.com/show_work.asp?id=nnnnn where nnnnn is the bibliography entry number. If you have additional questions regarding use or the copyright notice that you see at the bottom of each citation, please read our site copyright statement.

How often is the Bibliography updated?

This web version is updated at least once a month.

Why are there languages in the Ethnologue that are not represented in the Bibliography?

The SIL Bibliography is a record of the work of SIL. Members of SIL have done work in a lot of languages (about 2,000), but there are thousands more in which SIL members have not worked.

Comments, corrections or other questions about the Bibliography?

Please direct them to