Updates

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The Ethnologue has been one of the pillars of the World Christian Database classification of ethnolinguistic peoples since before Ethnologue's 11th edition of 1988. Since then Ethnologue codes have become the basis of the ISO 639 standard for the representation of names of languages, and Ethnologue itself is now published through a combination of electronic and printed editions.

The 17th edition of the "Ethnologue: Languages of the World" dataset was published online in December 2013 and became available in print form (in 3 volumes) in late 2014. Meantime the 18th edition of the Ethnologue database has also become available online. Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2015. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Eighteenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

The editing cycle of the World Christian Database allows for a relatively quick update of changed Ethnologue (and hence ISO) language codes with each new online edition, while analysis and incorporation of new languages generally awaits the printed edition.

This quarter sees the addition of newly discovered languages from the Ethnologue's 17th printed edition for about half of the world's countries with the remainder to follow in October.

Methodological update: Information on the WCD's taxonomy of the world's ethno-linguistic people groups is also added this quarter to the methodology document.

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In order to estimate the number of non-Christians who have personal contact with a Christian, a formula was developed and applied to each ethnolinguistic People Group. Results were summed and presented in the Atlas of Global Christianity (2009) as regional and global totals, expressed as the number and percentage of:

• Non-Christians who know a Christian
  
• Buddhists who know a Christian
• Hindus who know a Christian
• Muslims who know a Christian

These data are now available in the WCD on the new Personal Contact section of the Religion home page, with sample queries showing:

• a brief summary of percentages by continent
• and a fuller regional summary with numbers and percentages

While these fields can be seen under the ‘Personal Contact’ tabs in the detail screen of each Country and could also be added by users to any query at the Country level, it is suggested that reporting would be most helpful when confined to regional, continental or global totals.

Brief methodological notes are extracted to WCD_Personal_Contact_Notes.pdf from the Atlas of Global Christianity, Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p.350.

For the most complete discussion see Todd M. Johnson and Charles L. Tieszen, ‘Personal Contact: The sine qua non of Twenty-first Century Christian Mission’, Evangelical Missions Quarterly, October 2007, pages 494–502.

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