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Linguistics
Click here for 10th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 2006, co-sponsored by SIL.
Working in partnership with government agencies, the academic community, and indigenous language communities, SIL linguists assist in the documentation of Philippine languages and the development of resources in those languages. Historically, SIL's documentation efforts have been focused on two basic questions:
(1) What Philippine languages are there?
(2) What are these languages like?
The results of research by SIL linguists and others with regard to the first question are summarized in the Ethnologue, which provides the most complete listing available of Philippine languages.
The second question with regard to the characteristics of Philippine languages has motivated numerous academic publications over the years. Documentation of a language often begins with an analysis of its sound system (phonology). Phonological analysis reveals the number of distinctive sounds in a language, the knowledge of which benefits those involved in alphabet design (orthography). Linguists also analyze words (morphology) and their meanings (semantics), and how words combine (syntax) to form constructions of varying levels of complexity, from phrases to sentences to larger chunks of discourse. Philippine languages are especially noted for their complex verb morphology.
Important resources for language documentation include dictionaries, grammars, text collections, and other academic publications. The number of academic publications produced by SIL is surpassed, however, by the number of vernacular publications that SIL linguists have helped language communities produce. It is these publications, including phrase books, dictionaries, and readers, that speakers of the languages often value most.
Since 1953, SIL has conducted at least preliminary research in over 90 Philippine languages, and helped train countless linguists, language researchers, language associates, translators and teachers through formal and nonformal means.
SIL actively participates in the Linguistic Society of the Philippines and currently assists in staffing the Applied Linguistics Program at Alliance Graduate School in Manila.
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