Linguistic Resources

SIL produces textbooks, reference materials, software, and fonts to help researchers carry out linguistic fieldwork.

SIL produces resources for the purpose of assisting linguists in their fieldwork and research. These resources include textbooks, electronic and printed reference materials, software for linguistic data management and analysis, and fonts.

Publications

Examples of SIL publications that support linguistic fieldwork:

• SIL Textbooks
  The textbooks published by SIL have a particular focus on practical application in the field.
• Ethnologue
  A catalog of all the languages spoken in the world today.
• French/English Glossary of Linguistic Terms
  Contains thousands of linguistic concepts in both French and English.
• Linguistic Glossary
  An on-line glossary of over 950 technical terms with cross-references and sources.
• LinguaLinks Library Linguistics Bookshelf
  A CD-ROM filled with "electronic helps for field language work."  The Linguistics Bookshelf contains over a dozen works authored specially for LinguaLinks and another dozen books that have been republished in electronic form.
• SIL Electronic Working Papers
  A serial publication of papers on language and culture, especially as related to lesser-known and endangered languages. Besides linguistics, subject areas include sociolinguistics, anthropology, translation, literacy, language learning, and computing.
• The Phonicon
  An electronic encyclopedia of the speech sounds or "phones" of the world’s languages, and ways those sounds are described, written, and analyzed. Developed jointly by Dr. M. Stanley Whitley & Bakhit Kourman, and produced & published by SIL International.

Software

• SIL Language Software
  Collects together in one set of CD-ROMs the current versions of SIL’s computer programs and reference resources developed for use by language and culture learners and field researchers. Including...
• SIL FieldWorks
  A suite of tools to support a range of language work related tasks, which includes:
  FieldWorks Language Explorer: for dictionary development (lexical database), including by the semantic domain word collection approach (see Dictionary Development Process), interlinear text analysis, morphological parsing. Grammar information recorded can be compiled in an automatically generated grammar sketch.
  
• Speech Tools
  Three programs for Phonetic and phonological analysis [Windows]
  • Speech Analyzer: for recording, transcribing and analyzing sound files
  • Phonology Assistant: for managing transcribed Speech Analyzer sound files .
  • IPA Help: International Phonetic Alphabet audio-visual reference .
• Toolbox
  Unicode compatible upgrade from Shoebox, our popular program for interlinear text analysis and lexical database management also supports user-defined freeform databases. [ Windows] Mac and Linux versions are in process.
  

Fonts

• Doulos SIL
  A Unicode serif font similar to Times New Roman. It comes only in the regular typeface; bold, italic, and bold-italic are not available. It has built-in “smart-font” capabilities, so diacritics are properly placed. It contains
  • every base character, diacritic, and suprasegmental mark of the International Phonetic Alphabet currently in the Unicode Standard,
  • a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system. and
  • all the characters in the SIL Private Use Area. [Windows, Mac]
• Charis SIL
  A Unicode serif font intended for publishing applications with all four typefaces (regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic). It contains the same repertoire of characters as Doulos SIL.
• Gentium
  A Unicode serif font designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. Besides having most of the International Phonetic Association (IPA) characters, Gentium also supports both ancient and modern Greek, including a number of alternate forms.
• SIL Encore IPA Fonts (SIL IPA93 )
  This is a legacy (custom-encoded ) font family that contains the version of the International Phonetic Alphabet adopted in 1993 (and revised slightly in 1996). Besides the Doulos font (see “Doulos SIL” above), it includes, Sophia, a sans-serif font like Arial, and Manuscript, a monospace font. These fonts include regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic typefaces, allowing for near-publication quality typesetting. Because newer software does not support these kinds of fonts, their use is discouraged and there are no plans for further development. [Windows, Mac]