Welcome to the 18th edition!
In recognition of International Mother Language Day, we are happy to be able to update the Ethnologue to its 18th edition. Mother Language Day, February 21, reminds the world of the importance of the lesser-known languages of the world and that has been a particular area of focus of the Ethnologue since its inception. We're happy to be able to provide the most up-to-date information about the languages of the world on this day.
Now that we are on an annual update cycle and providing the data online, we have more confidence than ever that the data we report represent an accurate, though still not complete, picture of the state of the world's languages. This edition is the result of more than 12,000 individual changes to our database with 4,447 of the languages being affected by those edits. Not all of those edits result in substantive changes to the data, of course, as we continue to refine the way we present the data resulting in some changes that are purely typographical. For this edition we focused primarily on the languages of Africa and benefitted as well from a thorough review of our data on Deaf Sign Languages in Africa and Europe. Actually, any feedback we received this past year for any language in the world was considered as we made updates.
The most commonly requested and cited statistic from the Ethnologue is the tally of living languages. That number has gone down slightly with this edition from 7,106 in the 17th edition to 7,102 in the 18th. That change reflects changes in the ISO 639-3 inventory of languages which added 13 languages in its latest revision at the end of 2014 while removing 17 languages. The latter include 11 that were merged with other languages and 6 that were removed because they were duplicates or could not be substantiated as ever having been a language
Another important statistic is the number of extinct languages that are identified and reported on by the Ethnologue. We don't attempt to list all of the extinct, ancient, and classical languages of the world. We do report on languages that are what we call "recently extinct," that is, those that have gone out of use since the Ethnologue research project began in the early 1950s. Those languages are listed as EGIDS 10 Extinct in the Language Status category. In this edition we identify 367 extinct languages, which somewhat surprisingly is 6 fewer than we reported in the 17th edition one year ago. This can be attributed in large measure to the reclassification of some languages to EGIDS 9 (Dormant) based on new data we have received and to the removal of some languages which were long-extinct but remained in our database until now.
This edition also expands our coverage of the world by including separate entries for two additional countries--the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey. In addition, we have added new maps for Austria and Georgia and expanded and improved several other maps.
Along with these updates and improvements to the website, we have updated all of the country reports and the Global Dataset. The three regional volumes, which will be released in short order, will also be updated and include all of the 18th edition data and additional features.
And we're not done yet! While we continue to work diligently to research the languages of the world, we can benefit from our users who are familiar with specific countries and languages. We value your input and feedback and we encourage you to register, create a profile, and provide us with corrections, suggestions, and updates using the Feedback tab on each country and language page online.
On Mother Language Day, we hope you will be able to find YOUR mother language (or perhaps that of one of your ancestors) in the Ethnologue and celebrate the linguistic diversity that surrounds us.