Changes to Ethnologue

SIL has recently made some changes to its Ethnologue. It's now in its 15th edition.

I was curious to see if there were any changes to its page on the languages of the Philippines. The first I noticed is that where were no longer 169 living languages as stated in the 14th edition, but instead there were now 171. And instead of three extinct languages, there were now *gasp* four.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no way of automatically seeing what the changes are, so I had to manually make a comparison between the two versions.

So, here are my findings. Please direct any corrections to me.

Reclassifications

Seven of the existing languages were renamed.

Bontoc, South is now Finallig
Sama, Abaknon is now Inabaknon
Adasen is now Itneg, Adasen
Kalanguya, Keley-i is now Kallahan, Keley-i
Magindanaon is now Maguindanao
Sama, Balangigi is now Balangigi

Extinctions

One language was removed from the living languages portion and moved down to the extinct language. This language is Agta, Villa Viciosa formerly spoken in Abra Province.

Additions

There were three additions.

Itneg, Banao
Itneg, Moyadan
Filipino

Filipino?! I was surprised to see Filipino. If you've been reading my posts for a while, you know that I consider Filipino a dialect of Tagalog. But upon further investigation of the language tree, Filipino has been grouped as a dialect of Tagalog along with the current Tagalog dialects. I don't think that's an accurate way of putting it. Neither do I think Filipino merits its own entry.

On related news, I've ordered some books from SIL-Philippines. One of them is a Masbatenyo dictionary. But it's taking so long for them to arrive. SIL told me they sent it via airmail on March 7th, but it's already May. I hope they didn't get lost or anything. I had to pay extra for airmail shipping so they'd get here quickly instead of 2-6 months.

Until next time...