Check out the new Ethnologue!

In spite of some delays and a number of technical issues, I'm happy to report that the Ethnologue website you are looking at is now new and improved with the latest data (including the ISO 639-3 changes as of February 2014) and with several new features. As I reported earlier, the most important change with this release is the updated data. Since we released the revamped website last year, we have been receiving and processing a lot of updates and corrections and those are now reported in this release. If you have a language or country that you are particularly interested in, you should check it out to see what has changed. Overall, you'll note that the number of living languages has increased by one, from 7,105 to 7,106. There are other changes that you can look for by clicking on the Statistics tab on the home page.

Beyond the data, however, we are excited about some new features that we are able to offer through the website. The most notable of these is the ability for users of the Ethnologue to register. Becoming a registered user opens up the other new features that we are introducing with this release. So what do you get by registering? A major perk available to registered users is the ability to provide feedback directly to the editorial staff from any country or language page. The contact form (available under the Contact Us link on the About tab) still works, but now, instead of having to navigate away from the page you are looking at, you can add your feedback directly. What's more, other registered users who have subscribed to that same language or country will receive an email alert notifying them of your feedback contribution. We hope a conversation will develop that will not only improve the Ethnologue but will also foster linkages and collegial discussion. Comments submitted by this means are evaluated and responded to and the editorial actions taken become part of the community discussion.

A second feature available to registered users is the ability to purchase and download more than 200 Ethnologue products. The full print edition of the Ethnologue is in press as I write and will be released as 3 completely self-contained volumes. Those can be purchased via Amazon. In addition, we are adding individual country reports for most of the countries that are included in the Ethnologue. These PDF reports contain all of the country and language data, statistical tables, maps and numerous indexes. If viewed electronically, there are numerous internal links that take you quickly from a country or language to its map, or from an index listing to the language entry. If you are only interested in a specific country the country report will give you everything you need in a self-contained package for a very reasonable price.

The award-winning Ethnologue language maps can also be purchased and downloaded directly from the website.

And finally, for the first time we are pleased that we can make available the Ethnologue Global Dataset as a licensed product. The dataset is a subset of the Ethnologue database comprised of the "actionable" data fields. That is, fields that are not simply strings of text but which contain "normalized" data or Booleans are included in the dataset. This allows researchers to do their own analysis of the data by incorporating the Global Dataset tables into their own databases. The full documentation for the dataset and information about how to purchase a license to use the Ethnologue Global Dataset can be found by going to the Ethnologue Products page and following the links from there.

We are excited to see these new features coming online and we hope they will make the Ethnologue a much more useful tool for researchers, educators, linguists, and many others. One other new feature that bears special mention, is that you can also now comment on these blog posts. We look forward to hearing from you!