The LINGUIST List was founded by Anthony Rodriques Aristar in 1990 at the University of Western Australia, with 60 subscribers, before moving from Australia to Texas A&M University in 1991. In 1997, emails sent to the distribution list were also available on the list's own website, in the following sections: the profession (conferences, linguistic associations, programs), research and research support (papers, dissertation abstracts, projects, bibliographies, topics, texts), publications, pedagogy, language resources (languages, language families, dictionaries, regional information), and computer support (fonts and software). The LINGUIST List is a component of the WWW Virtual Library for linguistics.
Helen Dry, moderator of the LINGUIST List, wrote in August 1998: "The LINGUIST List, which I moderate, has a policy of posting in any language, since it's a list for linguists. However, we discourage posting the same message in several languages, simply because of the burden extra messages put on our editorial staff. (We are not a bounce- back list, but a moderated one. So each message is organized into an issue with like messages by our student editors before it is posted.) Our experience has been that almost everyone chooses to post in English. But we do link to a translation facility that will present our pages in any of five languages; so a subscriber need not read LINGUIST in English unless s/he wishes to. We also try to have at least one student editor who is genuinely multilingual, so that readers can correspond with us in languages other than English."
She added in July 1999: "We are beginning to collect some primary data. For example, we have searchable databases of dissertation abstracts relevant to linguistics, of information on graduate and undergraduate linguistics programs, and of professional information about individual linguists. The dissertation abstracts collection is, to my knowledge, the only freely available electronic compilation in existence."
MINORITY LANGUAGES ON THE WEB
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Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle has taught computing — through the Gaelic language — at the Institute Sabhal Mór Ostaig, on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. He has also maintained the bilingual (English, Gaelic) college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic. He wrote in May 2001: "Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, a Gaelic online terminology database. There are more hits on our website. There is more use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet. A major project has been the translation of the Opera web browser into Gaelic — the first software of this size available in Gaelic."
= The Ethnologue
Published by SIL International (SIL was initially known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), "The Ethnologue: Languages of the World" is an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages. The 16th edition was published in 2009, in print and on the web. The Ethnologue has been an active research project for more than fifty years. Thousands of linguists have contributed to the Ethnologue worldwide. A new edition is published approximately every four years.
The Ethnologue was founded in 1951 by Richard Pittman, who was motivated by the desire to share information on language development needs around the world with his colleagues at SIL International as well as with other language researchers. Richard Pittman was the editor of the 1st to 7th editions (1951-1969).
Barbara Grimes was the editor of the 8th to 14th editions (1971-2000). She wrote in January 2000: "It is a catalog of the languages of the world, with information about where they are spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers, what language family they are in, alternate names, names of dialects, other socio-linguistic and demographic information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index, and language maps." In 1971, information was expanded from primarily minority languages to encompass all known languages of the world. Between 1967 and 1973, she completed an in-depth revision of the information on Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, and a few countries of Asia. During her years as editor, the number of identified languages grew from 4,493 to 6,809. The information recorded on each language expanded so that the published work more than tripled in size.