SIL International

(Redirected from SIL)

Categories: Linguistics | Christian missions | Evangelical parachurch organisations

"SIL" redirects here. For other uses, see SIL (disambiguation).

SIL International is a worldwide non-profit, faith-based organization with the main purpose to study, develop and document lesser-known languages for the purpose of expanding linguistic knowledge, promoting world literacy and aiding minority language development. It provides resources in language research through Ethnologue.com. SIL's philosophy is that "no language is insignificant".

Critics accuse SIL to be an evangelical Christian missionary organisation, closely affiliated with the Wycliffe Bible Translators and collaborating with the New Tribes Mission, involved in displacing indigenous communities in the interest of large oil companies.

Contents

[edit]

History

SIL International, originally the Summer Institute of Linguistics, started as a small summer training session in Arkansas in 1934 to train missionaries of what later became Wycliffe Bible Translators in basic linguistic, anthropological and translation principles. The founder was William Cameron Townsend (1896-1982), a missionary to Guatemala.

One of the students at this first summer institute was Kenneth L. Pike (1912–2000), who was to become the foremost figure in the history of SIL. He served as SIL's President from 1942–1979 and then as President Emeritus until his death in 2000. He worked at the University of Michigan for many years. Dr. Pike was nominated fifteen consecutive years (1982-1996) for the Nobel Peace Prize.

SIL's current president is Carolyn P. Miller, who took the office in 1999 and participates in the linguistics program at Houghton College.

SIL International celebrated its 70 years of existence in June 2004.

[edit]

International recognition

SIL holds formal consultative status with UNESCO and United Nations. SIL also holds non-government organisation status in many countries. SIL provides instructors and instructional materials for linguistics programs at several major institutions of higher learning around the world.

In the USA these include Biola University, Moody Bible Institute, Houghton College, University of North Dakota, Northwest Christian College, Bryan College, University of Texas at Arlington, University of Oregon, and Dallas Theological Seminary.

Other universities with SIL programmes include Trinity Western University in Canada and Charles Darwin University in Australia.

[edit]

Controversy

[edit]

Linguistics

SIL has been accused of going against general linguistic community consensus (and contrary to the opinion of the majority of the speakers themselves in some cases) as to what constitutes a separate language (as opposed to a dialect). More notable are the classification of Flemish and several dialects of Swedish as separate languages with unique language codes. In cases like Scanian, the dialect does not meet the minimum criteria for mutual unintelligibily from Standard Swedish. SIL also attributes separate language status to "Yinglish", an English vernacular spoken by some Jewish Americans which is to some degree influenced by the Yiddish and Hebrew languages. Some of these classifications don't meet SIL's own professed criteria for classification.[1]

[edit]

Missionary activities

SIL has been accused to be involved in moving indegenous populations in South America from their native lands to make way for exploitation schemes of North American and European oil corporations. The most well-known example is the case of the Huaorani people in Ecuador, which resulted in many deaths and the moving of the people into reservations controlled by the missionaries.

"[The] Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an evangelical missionary group from the United States, [was accused] of sinister collusion with the oil companies. I was familiar with SIL missionaries from my Peace Corps days. The organization had entered Ecuador under the pretext of studying, recording, and translating indigenous languages.
"SIL had been working extensively with the Huaorani tribe in the Amazon basin area, during the early years of oil exploration, when a disturbing pattern emerged. Whenever seismologists reported to corporate headquarters that a certain region had characteristics indicating a high probability of oil beneath the surface, SIL went in and encouraged the indigenous people to move from that land, onto missionary reservations; there they would receive free food, shelter, clothes, medical treatment, and missionary-style education. The condition was that they had to deed their lands to the oil companies.
"Rumors abounded that SIL missionaries used an assortment of underhanded techniques to abandon their homes and move to the missions. A frequently repeated story was that they had donated food heavily laced with laxatives - then offered medicines to cure the diarrhea epidemic. Throughout Huaorani territory, SIL airdropped false-bottomed food baskets containing tiny radio transmitters; receivers at highly sophisticated communications stations, manned by U.S. military personnel at the army base in Shell, tuned into these transmitters. Whenever a member of the tribe was bitten by a poisonous snake or became seriously ill, an SIL representative arrived with antivenom or the proper medicines - often in oil company helicopters." (John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p.142)
"[The president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldós,] openly accused the Summer Institute of Linguistics of colluding with the oil companies, and then, in an extremely bold - perhaps reckless - move, he ordered SIL out of the country. [...] He died in a fiery helicopter crash on May 24, 1981. [...] Osvaldo Hurtado took over as Ecuadors president. He reinstated the Summer Institute of Linguistics and their oil company sponsors." (op. cit. p.156f.)
[edit]

Ethnologue and the SIL code

Main article: Ethnologue

The Ethnologue, published by SIL, assigns three-letter codes to languages. The 14th edition, published in 2000, included 7148 language codes which generally did not match the ISO 639-2 codes. (Some of the reasons for these differences are discussed in a paper on the "Mapping Between ISO 639 and the SIL Ethnologue: Principles Used and Lessons Learned", http://xml.coverpages.org/ISO6392-EthnologueRationale.pdf.)

The 15th edition, published in 2005, includes 7299 codes and these updated codes mostly match those in the new ISO 639-3. The differences between the codes in the 14th and 15th editions are outlined in http://www.ethnologue.com/codes (and the entire list from the 15th edition can be downloaded from http://www.ethnologue.com/codes/#downloading).

[edit]

External links

[edit]

Links to the SIL website

[edit]

Criticism of SIL activities

[edit]

Other sites

[edit]

References

  • Ruth Margaret Brend , Kenneth Lee Pike (eds.): The Summer Institute of Linguistics: Its Works and Contributions (Walter De Gruyter 1977), ISBN 9-02793-355-3.
  • Gerard Colby, Charlotte Dennett: Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (Harper Collins 1995), ISBN 0-06016-764-5. This book contains allegations of Rockefeller's use of American missionaries, and in particular, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, who cooperated in conducting surveys, transporting CIA agents and indirectly assisting in the genocide of tribes in the Amazon basin.
  • John Perkins: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2004), ISBN 1-57675-301-8. Contains several references to SIL missionary activities and displacement of indigenous peoples in South America.
  • W. A Willibrand: Oklahoma Indians and the "Summer Institute of Linguistics" (1953).
  • Is God an American? An Anthropological Perspective on the Missionary Work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (A Survival International Document, International Workgroup for Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen 1981), ISBN 8-79807-172-6.
  • Eni Pucinelli Orlandi: Sprache, Glaube, Macht: Ethik und Sprachenpolitik / Language, Faith, Power: Ethics and Language Policy. In: Brigitte Schlieben-Lange (ed.): Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 116, Katechese, Sprache, Schrift (University of Siegen / J.B. Metzler 1999) The author presents a discourse analysis of the practices of SIL.
  • Laurie K. Hart: The Story of the Wycliffe Translators: Pacifying the Last Frontiers. In: NACLA's Latin America & Empire Report, vol. VII, no. 10 (1973). This article describes SIL's collaboration with US oil corporations and military governments in South America in the 1950s and 1960s.
  • Michael Erard: How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages. In: New York Times, July 19th, 2005.ast:SIL

bg:SIL International zh-min-nan:SIL International de:SIL International es:SIL International fr:SIL International ko:국제 SIL id:SIL International it:SIL International ms:SIL nl:SIL International ja:国際SIL pl:SIL International pt:SIL International fi:SIL International tt:SIL th:SIL zh:SIL