SIL Language Technology

SIL International develops and supports a wide range of software to assist with language development activities: linguistic and cultural research, literacy and mother-tongue education, dictionary development, community and computer-assisted translation, and vernacular media production.

One part of the Language Technology team – The SIL Non-Roman Script Initiative (NRSI) is exclusively dedicated to meeting complex writing system needs so language communities can use their preferred writing system on computers, mobile devices and the web. The team does research, provides help and develops script-specific solutions, including fonts and keyboards.

Document

Key products such as the FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) support language documentation and analysis. Manage recordings of language data with SayMore. Build a dictionary easily with WeSay. Document scripts and writing systems with ScriptSource.

Publish

Our software enables language learning and literature production. Produce books for early readers with PrimerPro and Bloom. Publish dictionaries with Webonary. Support complex writing systems with award-winning fonts and keyboards and ground-breaking technologies, such as Graphite.

Participate

We rely on open tools and processes to develop our software, and welcome contributions and feedback. We also participate in the development of open standards such as Unicode, ISO 639-3, and LIFT. Contact us to get involved.

Developing Standards

Language Technology developers are actively engaged in developing data standards for language data. In collaboration with others in the industry, progress is being made on the following standards:

LIFT — LIFT (Lexicon Interchange FormaT) is an XML format for lexical information (dictionaries). LIFT allows movement of data between programs such as WeSay, FLEx and Lexique Pro.

Unicode — an industry-wide character set encoding standard designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. Closely related to ISO/IEC 10646.

ISO 639-3 — the International Organization for Standardization's registry of the languages of the world. It is comprised of living languages taken from SIL's Ethnologue, as well as extinct, ancient, reconstructed, and artificial languages. The current registry includes over 7000 languages, each identified by a unique three-letter code.

News & Updates

4 April 2018
Awami Nastaliq

Release 1.100

Awami Nastaliq 1.100 is a maintenance release of the Awami Nastaliq font. This release supports additional languages and provides improvements to glyph shapes and connections. Changes to this font inc… read more

20 March 2018
LingTree

New version of LingTree: version 1.0.0

This new, completely re-written version of LingTree runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems. It has the same functionality as the older, Windows-only version with the exception that it … read more

16 March 2018
FieldWorks

FieldWorks 8.3.12

FieldWorks for Windows will work with Paratext 8. FieldWorks for Linux will have to wait until version 9 to support Paratext 8. Most machines already have .Net 4.6.1 installed. But, especially on Wind… read more

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