Humans Who Read Grammars

In April this year, Ethnologue changed access restrictions to their website again. Now, non-paying users from high income countries can only access 1 page per month before they are banned, previously it was 7. In light of this change, we will go through some basics regarding the paywall again (old post here) and where you can go instead. Finally, I list some questions should any SIL International/Ethnologue staff see this post. Basics on the pay-wall We haven't received much detailed information on this change, but if it's the same as last time it means that users with IP-addresses in countries that are classified by the world bank as "high-income" will be restricted.   Cloudflare would appear to be the service provider managing this for Ethnologue.  Previously, we've learned that only 5% of users look at more than 7 pages per month.  We don't know how many go to more than 1 page (probably a lot more though!). SIL International also maintains the IS...

Thinking of turning that MA thesis into an article, putting together an edited volume from a workshop or finally writing that big book on discourse particles that is going to solve everything? Why not consider O pen Access (OA) publishing instead of the traditional publishing houses and journals? With OA, people have an easier time actually reading your work, and you won't be feeding money into a potentially shady system that exploits academics as editors and reviewers for free, and then makes the same community pay to read the products. Furthermore, by selecting OA options that have a good reputation, you're not in danger of the standing of your work lowered. There are several traditional publishing venues who exploit the benevolence of the academic community by not paying reviewers and/or editors, not paying authors and then expecting university libraries to pay expensive rates when buying the published research - research that tax payers somewhere probably has already f...

Lists, lists, lists & posts  - we've  got lists and posts to make you happy!! The Ethnologue might be instituting restrictions, but many other parts of linguistics - especially documentation and descriptive, is getting more and more open! list of open access venues in linguistics post explaining open access and varieties of it list of cross-linguistic databases  by Bodo Winter list of helpful blog posts on freely accessibly cross-linguistic databases posts tagged "free PDF", because - you guessed it - they contain links to interesting publicly available research  posts tagged "Open Access", because obvious a post on the newly started Open Access publishing house, Endangered Languages Publishing Also; why not indulge yourself in some of the other resources SIL has produced and that are accessible freely? Such as: Online Dictionaries of the World - Webonary ,  Linguistics Glossaries ( English only  &  French...

As many of our readers know, the great catalogue of the worlds languages Ethnologue has instituted a paywall. In the wake of this, there's been a lot of discussion at various venues about what this means, about SIL International and languages codes in general. I've been following and participating in these discussions, and I thought I'd share some points that might clarify things a bit and improve discussions and general understanding of these issues. Please have a read through these points and the statements Ethnologue and SIL International has done themselves if you want to get into the discussions. Jump the basics if you know them. First some basics Ethnologue is a product from SIL International. It started in 1951 and is now on its 18th edition. A new edition will from now on be coming out every year in North American Spring , i.e. relatively soon. Ethnologue features information on languages, in particular population stats, alternative names, genealogies and enda...

We're big fans of open access publishing and other ways of distributing knowledge in a fair and accessible way. We're also big fans of lists: we've got a list of resources on linguistic terminology , free online linguistic databases  and now also one for  open access publishing in linguistics . If we're missing something in our lists,  let us know . Also: check out our posts tagged with " free PDF " for tips on interesting articles in linguistics that are freely available. What's the deal with Open Access you ask? Commonly, tax payers pay for universities and other institutions to do research through funding bodies like the NSF or DFG . Researchers partially communicate with each other and document their research through scholarly publications. These publications are often edited and distributed through large commercial publishing houses. These publications are later bought by university libraries so that other researchers might read it. Uni...

There's a new Open Access Publishing initiative in town: Endangered Languages Publishing ! There are now three (Platinum) Open Access publishing houses in linguistics: Language Science Press , Language Documentation & Conservation and Endangered Languages Publishing . There are others, the old houses are trying to keep up, but these three adopt a very radical version of Open Access: publications are free for both authors and readers ("Platinum OA"). Endangered languages publishing (EL publishing for short) was just recently founded by Peter Austin, David Nathan and Julia Sallabank​​. Their website has already had over 1900 visitors and among other things contains the latest volume of Language Documentation and Description (LDD 12 -- a special issue on documentation and archiving), an app dealing with Khoi-san languages, and the complete back catalog of LDD volumes 1 to 11.​ David Nathan wrote a very good post on the PARADISEC blog about the first month of ...