A Brief History of SIL International
The principal founder of SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) was William
Cameron Townsend. He began early cross-cultural work with the Mayan Cakchiquel people of Guatemala in 1919. Without formal linguistic training he made a significant contribution to linguistic, educational and translation work among this group. By 1929 Townsend’s vision had broadened to include many other peoples on the fringes of development. His basic approach involved living in a village among the people, learning their language, developing an alphabet, beginning an education program and eventually translating the New Testament.
The actual organization known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics came into being in 1934 as a summer training program on a farm in the state of Arkansas, with 2 students attending. The course was repeated in 1935 with five students. After the course was over, four of the five students went with Townsend and his wife when they began field work among the Indian groups of Mexico. The enrollment of these summer classes grew each subsequent year.
Among these students, was Kenneth L. Pike who
began work on the Mixtec language in a remote village in the state of Oaxaca.
This work launched Pike into the study of tonal systems and phonology, and
eventually led to his work on language and society. Kenneth Pike served as
President of the Summer Institute of Linguistics until 1979. He is internationally
known not only for his personal work on dozens of lesser- known languages,
but also for stimulating thousands of other researchers to do likewise.
The summer sessions in western Arkansas continued and by 1941 had a much larger enrollment. That year one of the attendees was a professor of French from the University of Oklahoma. She had been assigned to work on one of the Indian languages spoken in that state. So impressed was she with the useful training received, that she convinced her chairman to invite Pike to the university to demonstrate some of those techniques. The result was that the Institute was invited to hold its sessions at the University in Norman, Oklahoma. This cooperative agreement with the University of Oklahoma continued until 1987, and almost 10,000 students over the years took the training offered in various aspects of linguistics, literacy and other cross-cultural work.
Similar
courses were offered in Australia and the United Kingdom by 1951, and a few
years later in Germany. Currently SIL and its partners
offer training courses on every continent. SIL has cooperative agreements
with a wide range of educational institutions, including the University of
Texas at Arlington, the University of Oregon and the University of North
Dakota in the United States, Trinity Western University in Canada and Northern
Territory
University in Australia. Individual courses and field workshops
are offered in many other countries. Each
year thousands of people are trained in these courses and workshops. [The
term Summer Institute of Linguistics now refers to both the linguistic training
programs and the various entities engaged in linguistic research and language
development work around the world.]
Researchers of SIL began working in much of the Americas during the 1940’s and 1950’s. Their basic program, like that of Townsend’s, revolved around village life: learning to speak the local language, studying phonological and grammatical structures; understanding the cultural context; assisting with language development matters such as alphabets, educational materials, diglot dictionaries and translating helpful materials including portions of the Bible. Usually this was done under the sponsorship of national government agencies and the results were made available to those agencies, other national institutions and the wider academic world.
This same program was developed over time in countries around the world, beginning in the Philippines in 1953, spreading from there to other parts of the Pacific and Asia, in Africa in 1962, and in parts of Europe starting in 1974. Work has been completed in two countries and is in progress in about 50. SIL’s approach has taken on new dimensions as its work has expanded to many different environments. In addition to living in the village with the people as much as possible, this method has been supplemented with others when demanded by the particular situation.
SIL works in partnerships with people speaking less commonly known languages. As national education systems have increased opportunities and skills for these local people, they have assumed increasingly significant responsibilities. SIL is committed to enhancing their training to build further depth and competence. Working together in this manner has been shown to further strengthen cultural identity.
When SIL was formed in 1934, linguists estimated that there were about 1,000 ethnolinguistic minority languages in the world. As language researchers continued their investigation, many more languages were documented. Now it is known that there are nearly 7,000 languages still spoken today. The conclusions of this ongoing research have been published in a reference work called the Ethnologue: Languages of the World, found online at http://www.ethnologue.com/. A new edition of this catalog of languages is published every four years. The fifteenth edition, published in 2005, lists 6,912 languages.
In its 70 year history, SIL has worked with over 2,072 languages. Currently there are over 1,300 SIL language-based development programs in progress. The SIL Bibliography contains over 25,000 references to books, journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, and other academic papers about languages and cultures authored or edited by SIL International staff or published by SIL. In addition to a body of literature in ethnic minority languages, over 710 New Testaments have been translated as well as numerous portions of Scripture.