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Practical Language Development: Whose Mission?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Lise M. Dobrin  and
Jeff Good
Lise M. Dobrin*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Jeff Good*
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo
*
Dobrin, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, Brooks Hall—PO Box 400120, Charlottesville, VA 22904–4120 [dobrin@virginia.edu]
Good, Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 [jcgood@buffalo.edu]
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Extract

The purpose of this paper is to explore academic linguistics' tacit reliance on a Christian missionary organization, SIL International, to develop technological infrastructure and offer service in local linguistic communities—areas that have generally been ignored by academic linguistics because they have been seen as falling outside its domain of professional responsibility. We refer to these kinds of activities as PRACTICAL LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT because they draw upon linguistic expertise to solve practical real-world problems. Until now, academic linguists have benefited from the practical language development work carried out by our missionary counterparts without much deliberation. But with the contemporary rise in concern over language endangerment, the time has come for us to reflect on how this partnership of convenience can be reconciled with the changing priorities of the discipline. As we redouble our efforts to document, understand, and support the world's linguistic diversity, academic linguists are taking a renewed interest in fieldwork. There are more numerous and generous sources of funding for endangered-language research. Documentary linguistics, which takes the collection, preservation, and annotation of primary linguistic data as its key aim, is emerging as a subfield in its own right (Woodbury 2003, Himmelmann 2006). A growing recognition of the social and economic forces that drive language shift has led many linguists to see basic research in small, minority, and indigenous language communities as addressing issues of human rights (Nettle & Romaine 2000, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Hinton 2002). Moral and political questions like who funds linguistic work, who carries it out, and who benefits from it and how are much harder to ignore in the context of these changes (Dorian 1993, England 1995). At the same time, changes in the way information is communicated, initiated by the spread of digital technology, have created demands for precise methods of referring to language names, written characters, lexical items, and other linguistic objects. But movements within the academy have not kept pace with these demands.

Information

Type
SIL International and the Disciplinary Culture of Linguistics
Information
Language , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 619 - 629
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Linguistic Society of America

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References

* Versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Anaheim, CA and in the University of Virginia Linguistic Anthropology Seminar, Charlottesville, VA, in January 2007; at the Gallaudet University Department of Linguistics and Department of Interpretation, Washington, DC, in March 2007; and at the Symposium on Engagement and Activisim in Endangered Languages Research at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK, in May 2008. We are grateful to the audiences at each of these presentations for helpful comments and discussion.

We wish to thank the other contributors to this collection for their commitment to constructive dialogue, in some cases across great differences in position. We also thank all those who have provided useful information, critical feedback, or encouragment throughout this project: Peter Austin, Ira Bashkow, Bob Conrad, Ellen Contini-Morava, Eve Danziger, Dan Everett, Spike Gildea, John Goldsmith, Brian Joseph, Dan Lefkowitz, Ceil Lucas, Melissa Maceyko, Paul Newman, Johanna Nichols, David Sapir, Mark Sicoli, Gary Simons, Joan Spanne, Louis Suarez-Potts, and three anonymous Language referees. We are quite sure that none of these people agrees with everything we say.

1 For the Americas, see, for example, Hanzeli 1969, Haas 1978, McKevitt 1990, Koerner 2004. Gray 2000 is an excellent concise historical overview of missionary linguistics.

2 See also Pennycook and Coutand-Marin's 2003 critique of global English teaching, perhaps today's most active linguistic mission field.

3 A number of scholarly works address the relationship between missionaries and anthropologists. They are by no means all critical. Works focused specifically on SIL include Hvalkof & Aaby 1981b, Stoll 1982, Colby & Dennett 1995, and Hartch 2006. Louis-Jean Calvet's 1987 book La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques has a chapter devoted to a critique of SIL, though remarkably, it is excised without comment from the English language edition (Calvet 1998). An English translation by Victor Manfredi can be read online at http://people.bu.edu/manfredi/CalvetChl4anglaisSIL.pdf.

4 Indeed, the SIL fonts that serve as a standard resource for linguists of all persuasions have names drawn from Christian theology: Doulos from the Greek for ‘servant’, Charis from the Greek for ‘grace’, Gentium from Latin ‘of the nations’.

5 SIL linguists are keenly aware that their supporters' primary focus is on their work's spiritual impact, since in most cases they raise funds for their work themselves. An emphasis on the spiritual dividends of SIL's technical investments is evident in statements such as these from SIL/Wycliffe promotional materials: ‘Media tools are like salt, making people thirsty for God's Word’ (JAARS n.d.), or ‘God created computers for missions. He just lets the rest of the world use them’ (Wycliffe Bible Translators 2004).

6 SIL has been developing FieldWorks Language Explorer as a replacement, though currently it runs only on Microsoft Windows (http://www.sil.org/computing/fieldworks/flex; see Butler & van Volkinburg 2007). Individuals associated with SIL have continued to develop Shoebox under the new name ‘Toolbox’, but these activities do not represent official efforts on the part of SIL's computing division.

7 See http://www.sil.org/iso639–3/.

8 See, for example, the solicitation for the 2006 National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities Documenting Endangered Languages grants (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06577/nsf06577.htm), which encourages the use of three-letter SIL codes in the titles of all proposals, or the 2003 Open Language Archives Community standards recommendation for language references in metadata records (Bird & Simons 2003).

9 Ethnologue may be the best listing of the world's languages that is available, but it is also widely recognized to be ‘far from accurate or consistent’ (Evans 2010:22). While we might have expected the academic community to embrace the opportunity provided by the new open ISO standard to seriously engage with these problems, this has not in fact happened. Of the more than 450 ISO 639–3 code change requests submitted through the first three review cycles (for 2006, 2007, and 2008; see http://www.sil.org/iso639–3/), whose status was resolved as of February 26, 2009, only around fifteen percent were submitted by individuals who were not affiliated with SIL, New Tribes, or other mission organizations. The most recent cycle was the most balanced of the three, with about an even divide between mission and nonmission submissions. But this still strikes us as a rather skewed participation profile for an international standard.

10 Even here, the impetus comes in part from outside funding initiatives, which are reorienting priorities within the discipline.

11 The Australian Indigenous Languages Database (AUSTLANG; http://austlang.aiatsis.gov.au/) offers an example of what such a resource might look like. Note that the database attempts to provide an index of the available documentation for each language, and so includes for each a documentation ‘score’. A related effort is found in the UNESCO Atlas of the world's languages in danger (Moseley 2009).

12 See http://meta.wikimedia.Org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy (accessed February 26, 2009).

13 The political nature of code change decisions is clearly on display in the discussion surrounding the proposal of a distinct code for Valencian, a language variety currently covered under the code [cat], also associated with Catalan. The proposal was ultimately rejected, but not before generating over a hundred pages of comments from interested parties (http://www.sil.org/IS06393/cr_files/PastComments/CR_Comments_2006–129.pdf).

14 Work on the Script Encoding Initiative is a notable exception to the general pattern of academic inattention to minority scripts; see Anderson 2003, 2007. For a general overview of SIL's Non-Roman Script Initiative, see http://scripts.sil.org/default. For discussion of efforts to integrate the software from the Non-Roman Script Initiative's Graphite font rendering system into non-SIL software, see Byfield 2006.

15 So when it comes to digital audio analysis, for example, one finds that the most successful tools, like Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2009), are not SIL products.

16 Missiologist John Hitchen (2002) makes this point from a complementary perspective. Citing the vision for contemporary anthropology's public role as a ‘witness and recorder of our times’ that ‘enlarges our sense of moral community’ by helping us to better appreciate ‘the cultural diversity that pervades our globe’ (Borofsky 1994:487–88), Hitchen suggests that mainstream anthropology should be open to learning from its missionary counterparts.

17 http://www.sil.org/sil/news/2006/PNGstamps.htm

18 Currently SIL covers the expenses associated with maintaining the code set.

19 http://pih.org

20 http://ewb-usa.org