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Ethnologue: Languages of the World

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Ethnologue: Languages of the World

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Ethnologue > Print version > Sample pages

Sample Pages from
Ethnologue, Print Version

The sample files are PDF files, requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them. The reader is free and is available for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX from Adobe's Acrobat download page. Follow their instructions for installing the reader on your computer and configuring your Web browser to handle PDF files.

View sample language entries page

Language entries represent separate languages or probable languages (highly divergent 'dialects') according to our best sources. Variants of the language that are not distinct enough to need separate literature are treated as dialects, and are listed under the language entry and not as separate entries, unless attitudes or other social factors are strong enough that they need to be treated as separate sociolinguistic entities. For many language entries, however, we lack information on dialect intelligibility, and so have followed our best sources as to what they consider to be a language or a dialect.

View sample page from the language maps

Language maps showing the locations of language homelands are available for most countries of the world. Many maps show the approximate boundaries of the language groups. On a few maps where the language boundaries are not known, the names or numbers alone appear. Some languages are not shown due to lack of information about location.

View sample page from the Language Name Index

The Language Name Index is an index of the 39,491 distinct names that are associated with the 7,299 languages listed in Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth Edition, 2005. It is an alphabetical list of all the language names, alternate names, dialect names, and alternate dialect names that appear in the language entries.

View sample page from the Language Code Index

The Language Code Index gives an alphabetical listing of all 7,299 three-letter codes that are used in this volume to uniquely identify languages. Each distinct language in the world is assigned a unique three-letter code. For more details about the development of these three-letter codes, see “History of the Ethnologue.”