SIL Lakota/Dakota Language Collection

The SIL, or Summer Institute of Linguistics, was founded in 1934 by William Cameron Townsend (1896-1982). It was Townsend´s intention to thoroughly explore and document every minority language on the globe that had not yet been analyzed. Through his creation of the SIL, Townsend´s dreams have been brought to fruition and in the latter part of the twentieth century, the SIL has published studies on over 1,000 languages and is in the process of studying over 1,000 additional languages. Townsend was also instrumental in involving governmental and educational bodies in bringing more dignity and recognition to minority peoples.

Without having any formal linguistic training, Townsend immersed himself in minority culture and language, beginning with the Mayan Cakchiquel of Guatemala. The SIL, as an organization, was instituted in the summer of 1934 and had only two students, in 1935, five students attended. Subsequent summers showed increased enrollment and several students joined Townsend and his wife in Mexico to do field work. One of Townsend´s students, Kenneth Pike, who worked with Mixtec language in Oaxaca, served as the SIL´s president until 1979. His research is world-renowned.

The growing popularity of the SIL among fellow academicians culminated in the relocation of the program to the University of Oklahoma, at Norman, until 1987. The approaches and techniques of the program were considered so effective that similar programs emerged in Australia and the United Kingdom in 1951, and later in Germany. Several United States universities have also incorporated SIL´s program into their curriculum.

In the 1940´s and 1950´s SIL´s focus remained on villages in the Americas, where the observations of culture, phonology, and grammar were made and educational services were provided to the services, including alphabet systems, diglot dictionaries, and translations of the Bible. In later decades the program spread into Asia, the Pacific, Africa, the Philippines, and parts of Europe. The SIL has created a reference book entitled the Ethnologue, which is updated every four years. The most recent edition, published in 2000, listed over 6,800 identified languages. The SIL Bibliography includes over 1,600 monographs, 210 published doctoral dissertations, 323 published master´s theses, and over 8,000 published articles.

http://www.sil.org/