Humans Who Read Grammars

Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis just wrote a very important blog post abut how to not use Ethnologue . Ethnologue is a catalog of the worlds languages with information on their genealogical relationship, number of speakers and some more demographic information. It's by SIL, the holders of the ISO-codes for language name s. Ethnologue is usually the first go-to source for anyone wanting to know number of speakers and family relations and ISO-codes, both linguists and non-linguists use it frequently. (You can also use Glottolog , which often has better genealogical trees, division of languages and A LOT of bibliographical data, but no info on number of speakers or all countries the language is spoken in.) Basically, governments have been misusing Ethnologue by using it as the ultimate source on who speaks what where.  In one case, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service used the fact that the Ethnologue had no listing for a language by the name a defendant was us...