SIL Global (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics International) is an evangelical Christian nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages, and aid minority language development.
Based on its language documentation work, SIL publishes a database, Ethnologue, of its research into the world's languages, and develops and publishes software programs for language documentation, such as FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) and Lexique Pro.
Its main offices in the United States are located at the International Linguistics Center in Dallas, Texas.
History
Early history William Cameron Townsend, a Presbyterian minister, founded the organization in 1934, after undertaking a Christian mission with the Disciples of Christ among the Kaqchikel Maya people in Guatemala in the early 1930s. In 1933, he turned to Mexico to translate the Bible into indigenous languages there, as he had done for Kaqchikel. Townsend established a working relationship with the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education under the government of President Lázaro Cárdenas (in office 1934–1940) and founded SIL to educate linguist-missionaries to work in Mexico. Because the Mexican government did not allow missionary work through its educational system, Townsend founded Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1942 as a separate organization from SIL. Wycliffe Bible Translators focused on Bible translation and missionary activities, whereas SIL focused on linguistic documentation and literacy education.
Having initiated collaboration with the Mexican education authorities, Townsend started the institute as a small summer training session in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, in 1934 to train missionaries in basic linguistic, anthropological, and translation principles. Through the following decades, the SIL linguists worked at providing literacy education to indigenous people of Mexico, while simultaneously working with the Wycliffe Bible Translators on Bible translation. One of the students at the first summer institute in its second year, 1935, Kenneth Lee Pike (1912–2000), would become the foremost figure in the history of SIL. He served as SIL's president from 1942 to 1979, then as president emeritus until he died in 2000.
Instituto Lingüístico de Verano The Mexican branch, , was established in 1948.
Kidnapping and murder of Chester A. Bitterman in Colombia
On January 19, 1981, SIL field worker Chester "Chet" A. Bitterman was taken hostage by far-left guerilla group M-19 in Colombia who believed SIL was a cover operation for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). SIL denied involvement with any government intelligence agency stating that it was against their policy.
M-19 demanded SIL withdraw all 209 of its people from Colombia, or else they would kill Bitterman. After 48 days of SIL refusing to yield to the demands, Bitterman was found murdered.
2000–present In 2016, Michel Kenmogne from Cameroon became executive director. In 2025, Johnstone Ndunde became executive director.
, SIL said it had 1,350 language projects in 98 countries and 4,200 staff from 84 countries. By 2023, this had risen to 1,530 language projects in 107 countries, with a corresponding increase in staff to 4,373 people from 86 countries. The organization reports that these languages are spoken by 950 million people.
Vision and mission The vision of SIL Global is: "We long to see people flourishing in community using the languages they value most." Their mission states: "Inspired by God's love, we advocate, build capacity, and work with local communities to apply language expertise that advances meaningful development, education, and engagement with Scripture."
Contributions SIL's principal contribution to linguistics has been the data that have been gathered and analyzed from over 1,000 minority and endangered languages,. many of which had not been previously studied academically. SIL endeavors to share both its data and the results of its analysis to contribute to the overall knowledge of language. This has resulted in publications on languages such as Hixkaryana and Pirahã, which have challenged the universality of some linguistic theories. SIL's work has resulted in over 20,000 technical publications, all of which are listed in the SIL Bibliography.. Most of these are a reflection of linguistic fieldwork..
SIL's focus has not been on the development of new linguistic theories, but tagmemics, though no longer promoted by SIL, was developed by Kenneth Pike, who also coined the words emic and etic, more widely used today in anthropology.Headland et al. 1990.
Another focus of SIL is literacy work, particularly in indigenous languages. SIL assists local, regional, and national agencies that are developing formal and informal education in vernacular languages. These cooperative efforts enable new advances in the complex field of educational development in multilingual and multicultural societies..
SIL provides instructors and instructional materials for linguistics programs at several major institutions of higher learning around the world. In the United States, these include Dallas International University, Biola University, Moody Bible Institute, and Dallas Theological Seminary. Other universities with SIL programs include Trinity Western University in Canada, Charles Darwin University in Australia, and Universidad Ricardo Palma in Lima, Peru.
The organization has recently established a new Language and Culture Documentation Services Unit that aims to preserve and revitalize languages threatened by extinction. The creation of this department reflects a growing interest in documenting endangered languages and incorporates a multidisciplinary approach to anthropology and linguistics..
Affiliations SIL has Consultative Status with UNESCO as an NGO and has Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) as an advocate for ethnolinguistic communities.SIL, International Relations, sil.org, USA, retrieved August 24, 2021
The organization is a member of the Forum of Bible Agencies International and Micah Network, and is a founding member of Maaya, the World Network for Linguistic Diversity.SIL, Partnerships, sil.org, USA, retrieved August 24, 2021
Methodological contributions Ethnologue and ISO 639-3 codes
Ethnologue: A Guide to the World's Languages has been published by SIL since 1951.Keith Brown, Sarah Ogilvie, Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World, Elsevier, Netherlands, 2010, p. 385Stepp, John Richard, Hector Castaneda, and Sarah Cervone. "Mountains and biocultural diversity." Mountain Research and Development 25, no. 3 (2005): 223-227. "For the distribution of languages we used the Ethnologue database produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Ethnologue is widely regarded as the most comprehensive data source of current languages spoken worldwide."
From the 13th edition (1997) onwards, the entire contents of the published book were also shared online. From the 17th edition onwards (2013) the publication shifted to a web-centric paradigm, meaning that the website is now the primary means by which the database is accessed. Among other advantages, this greatly facilitates user contributions. A new edition is now published every February. The 29th edition was released in February 2026 and lists 7,170 languages.
Starting with the 16th edition (2009), Ethnologue uses the ISO 639-3 standard, which assigns 3-letter codes to languages; these were derived in part from the 3-letter codes that were used in the Ethnologue's 15th edition. SIL is the registration authority for the ISO 639–3 standard.
With the publication of the 17th edition (2016), Ethnologue launched a subscription service, claiming that the paywall would only affect 5% of users. Users who contribute over 100 accepted changes are rewarded with lifetime free access.
A comprehensive review of the 16th, 17th and 18th editions acknowledged that "[Ethnologue] is at present still better than any other non-derivative work of the same scope" except that "[it] fails to disclose the sources for the information presented.
Software SIL has developed widely used software for linguistic research. Adapt It is a tool for translating text from one language into a related language after performing limited linguistic analysis. In the field of lexicon collection, ShoeBox, the newer ToolBox (Field Linguist's Toolbox), and Lexique ProGuérin, Valérie, and Sébastien Lacrampe. "Lexique Pro." Technology Review 1, no. 2 (2007): 2. have largely been replaced by FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx Windows and Linux)Baines, David. "FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx)." eLEX2009: 27.Butler, L., & HEATHER, V. V. (2007). Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx). Language documentation & conservation, 1(1).Ulinski, M., Balakrishnan, A., Bauer, D., Coyne, B., Hirschberg, J., & Rambow, O. (June 2014). Documenting endangered languages with the wordseye linguistics tool. In Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (pp. 6-14). "One of the most widely-used toolkits in the latter category is SIL FieldWorks (SIL FieldWorks, 2014), or specifically, FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx). FLEx includes tools for eliciting and recording lexical information, dictionary development, interlinearization of texts, analysis of discourse features, and morphological analysis. An important part of FLEx is its "linguistfriendly" morphological parser (Black and Simons, 2006), which uses an underlying model of morphology familiar to linguists, is fully integrated into lexicon development and interlinear text analysis, and produces a human-readable grammar sketch as well as a machine-interpretable parser. The morphological parser is constructed "stealthily" in the background, and can help a linguist by predicting glosses for interlinear texts." for linguists and WeSay (also Windows and Linux) for non-professionals. SIL also provides a "Webonary" website for publishing dictionaries. Graphite is a smart-font technology and rendering system.Black, H. Andrew, and Gary F. Simons. "The SIL Field-Works Language Explorer approach to morphological parsing." Computational Linguistics for Lessstudied Languages: Texas Linguistics Society 10 (2006).Bird, S., & Simons, G. (2003). Seven dimensions of portability for language documentation and description. Language, 557-582. Keyman is a keyboard software solution for typing over 2000 of the world's languages and can be used to make custom keyboards.
Fonts SIL has developed several widely used font sets that it makes available as free software under the SIL Open Font License (OFL).Cahill, Michael, and Elke Karan. "Factors in designing effective orthographies for unwritten languages." SIL International (2008). The names of SIL fonts reflect the Biblical mission of the organization charis (Greek for "grace"), doulos (Greek for "servant") and (Latin for "of the nations"). These fonts have become standard resources for linguists working on the documentation of the world's languages. Most of them are designed only for specific writing systems, such as Ethiopic, Devanagari, New Tai Lue, Hebrew, Arabic, Khmer, Yi, Myanmar, Coptic, and Tai Viet, or some more technical notation, such as cipher musical notation or IPA. Fonts that support Latin include:
Gentium: "a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin- and Cyrillic-based alphabets."