The Ethnologue contains statistics for 7,358 languages in the 16th edition, released in 2009 (up from 6,912 in the 15th edition, released 2005 and 6,809 in the 14th edition, released 2000) and gives the number of speakers, location, dialects, linguistic affiliations, availability of the Bible and so forth. It is currently the most comprehensive existing language inventory, along with the Linguasphere Observatory Register. However, some information is dated.

What counts as a language depends on socio-linguistic evaluation: see Dialect. As the preface says, "Not all scholars share the same set of criteria for what constitutes a 'language' and what features define a 'dialect.

In 1984, the Ethnologue released a three-letter coding system, called a SIL code, to identify each language that it describes. This set of codes significantly exceeded the scope of previous standards, e.g., ISO 639-1. The 14th edition, published in 2000, included 7148 language codes which generally did not match the ISO 639-2 codes. In 2002 the Ethnologue was asked to work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to integrate its codes into a draft international standard. The Ethnologue now uses this standard, called ISO 639-3. The 15th edition which was published in 2005 includes 7299 codes. A 16th edition was released in the middle of 2009.

In addition to choosing a primary name for the language, it also gives some of the names by which a language is called by its speakers, by the government, by foreigners and by neighbors, as well as how it has been named and referenced historically, regardless of which designation is considered official, politically correct or offensive or by whom.

William Bright, then editor of ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'', wrote that it "is indispensable for any reference shelf on the languages of the world" (1986:698).

Language families

See also

References

External links

Category:Linguistics Category:Linguistics publications Category:Language families

Being of Jewish origin, both his parents were arrested and murdered during World War II. He studied medicine at the University of Paris. He wrote several books of popular science on psychology. He is known in France for developing and explaining to the public the concept of Psychological resilience.

He is a professor at the University of the South, Toulon-Var. He was awarded the 2008 Prix Renaudot de l'essai.

List of some of his books (in English)

External links

Category:1937 births Category:French psychiatrists Category:Ethologists Category:Psychologists Category:French Jews Category:Nazi concentration camp survivors Category:Living people Category:Prix Renaudot winners

He is considered to be one of the founders of the cinéma vérité in France, which shared the aesthetics of the direct cinema spearheaded by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles. Rouch's practice as a filmmaker for over sixty years in Africa, was characterized by the idea of ''shared anthropology.'' Influenced by his discovery of surrealism in his early twenties, many of his films blur the line between fiction and documentary, creating a new style of ethnofiction. He was also hailed by the French New Wave as one of theirs. His seminal film ''Me a Black'' (''Moi un Noir'') pioneered the technique of jump cut popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. Godard said of Rouch in the Cahiers du Cinéma (''Notebooks on Cinema'') n°94 April 1959, "In charge of research for the Musée de l'Homme (French, "Museum of Man") Is there a better definition for a filmmaker?" Along his career, Rouch was no stranger to controversy. He would often repeat, "Glory to he who brings dispute."

Biography

Jean Rouch is generally considered the father of Nigerien cinema. Despite arriving as a colonialist in 1941, Rouch remained in Niger after independence, and mentored a generation of Nigerien filmmakers and actors, including Damouré Zika and Oumarou Ganda.

Arriving in Niamey as a French colonial hydrology engineer in 1941, Rouch became interested in Zarma and Songhai ethnology and began to film local people and their rituals. In the 1940s he met Damouré Zika the son of a Songhai/Sorko traditional healer and fisherman, near the town of Ayorou on the Niger River. After ten Sorko workers in a construction depot which Rouch supervised were killed by a lightning strike, Zika's grandmother, a famous possession medium and spiritual advisor, presided over a ritual for the men, which Rouch later claimed sparked his desire to make ethnographic film.

By 1950, Rouch had made the first films set in Niger with ''au pays des mages noirs'' (1947), '' l'initiation à la danse des possédés'' (1948) and ''Les magiciens de Wanzarbé'' (1949), all of which documented the spirit possession rituals of the Songhai, Zarma, and Sorko peoples living along the Niger river.

Damouré Zika and Rouch became friends, and Rouch began in 1950 to use Zika as the focus of his films demonstrating the traditions, culture, and ecology of the people of the Niger River valley. The first of 150 in which Zika appeared was "''Bataille sur le grand fleuve''" (1950–52), portraying the lives, ceremonies and hunting of Sorko fishermen. Rouch spent four months traveling with Sorko fishermen in a traditional Pirogue filming the piece.

During the 1950s, Rouch began to produce longer, narrative films. In 1954 he filmed Damouré Zika in "Jaguar", as a young Songhai man traveling for work to the Gold Coast. Filmed as a silent ethnographic piece, Zika helped re-edit the film into a feature length movie which stood somewhere between documentary and fiction, and provided dialog and commentary for a 1969 release. In 1957 Rouch directed in Côte d'Ivoire "''Moi un noir''" with the young Nigerien filmmaker Oumarou Ganda, who had recently returned from French military service in Indochina. Ganda went on to become the first great Nigerien film director and actor. By the early 1970s, Rouch, with cast, crew, and cowriting from his Nigerien collaborators, was producing full length dramatic films in Niger, such as Petit à petit ("''Little by Little''" : 1971) and Cocorico Monsieur Poulet ("''Cocka-doodle-doo Mr. Chicken''": 1974).

Still, many of the ethnographic films produced in the colonial era by Jean Rouch and others were rejected by African film makers because in their view they distorted African realities.

He is considered as one the pioneers of Nouvelle Vague, of visual anthropology and the father of ethnofiction. Rouch's films mostly belonged to the ''cinéma vérité'' school – a term that Edgar Morin used in a 1960 France-Observateur article referring to Dziga Vertov's Kinopravda. His best known film, one of the central works of the Nouvelle Vague, is ''Chronique d'un été'' (1961) which he filmed with sociologist Edgar Morin and in which he portrays the social life of contemporary France. Throughout his career, he used his camera to report on life in Africa. Over the course of five decades, he made almost 120 films.

With Jean-Michel Arnold he founded the international documentary film festival, the Cinéma du Réel at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1978.

He died in an automobile accident in February 2004, some 16 kilometres from the town of Birni-N'Konni, Niger.

Main films

References

Bibliography

External links

Category:1917 births Category:2004 deaths Category:Road accident deaths in Niger Category:Visual anthropologists Category:French anthropologists Category:Cinema of France Category:Cinema of Niger