Language Development
Building cultural capacity through sustainable, community-driven solutions for language development, academic knowledge, and learning products.
Development Strategies
Pathways to Creating Possibilities
Growth
We engage in foundational linguistics research, develop writing systems and solutions, and produce grammars and dictionaries.
Literacy
SIL supports functional adult and women’s literacy programs. We develop literacy tools, primers, and texts to support learning and community development.
Education
We partner with communities to develop and deliver teacher training and mother tongue based primary education curriculums.
Language Changes Lives
More Than Merely Speech or Text
“Mother tongue” languages are the languages natively spoken by various people groups, and they are closely tied to cultural identity. These languages often feel most natural to native speakers and have a special place in their hearts, but they can be hard to preserve compared with more commonly used trade languages.
SIL Ethiopia is committed to helping local language communities build up the resources and expertise they require to develop and sustain their mother tongue in the future. From surveying languages and dialects to working out how languages might best be written, we help lay a firm foundation for further growth of languages in education, literacy, and translation.
Literacy
Language Development In Action
By teaching literacy in local communities, we help them expand possibilities for a better life. The results of literacy encourage greater knowledge of farming techniques, medical principles, and communication methods. Because of this, literate communities are able to enjoy lower disease, hunger, poverty, and mortality rates.
Objectives
We aim to empower local teachers, government agencies, and language experts to increase literacy education in their mother tongue languages.
Materials
We work in partnership with local speakers to produce written materials that support the development of reading, writing, and numeracy skills.
Opportunities
Our efforts are designed and structured to equally aid all age groups in their learning process through elementary, adult, and women’s programs.