Who We Are
SIL International is a nonprofit organization committed to serving language communities worldwide as they build capacity for sustainable language development. The organization has completed linguistic investigation in over 2,590 languages representing over 1.7 billion speakers in nearly 100 countries.
SIL is about languages and the people that speak them. Language is a deeply personal part of individual and community identity.
Our vision is that language communities have the information and skills to ensure that their language continues to serve their changing social, cultural, political and spiritual needs. We serve alongside communities as researchers, trainers and consultants, supporting efforts such as creating writing systems, adult literacy classes, mother tongue based multilingual education programs and development of books and other resources in the local language.
Through extensive language survey efforts, SIL is a leader in the identification and documentation of the world's languages. Results of this research are published in Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Ethnologue is a comprehensive reference work cataloguing all of the world's 7,097 living languages.