[5][6] For instance, as of 2008, information on word order was present for 15% of entries while religious affiliations were mentioned for 38% of languages.

[6][10] SIL's field linguists use an online collaborative research system to review current data, update it, or request its removal.

"[5] The criteria used by Ethnologue are mutual intelligibility and the existence or absence of a common literature or ethnolinguistic identity.

Ethnologue was founded in 1951 by Richard S. Pittman and was initially focused on minority languages, to share information on Bible translation needs.

[20] In 2015, SIL's funds decreased and in December 2015, Ethnologue launched a metered paywall to cover its cost, as it is financially self-sustaining.

[1] Users in high-income countries who wanted to refer to more than seven pages of data per month had to buy a paid subscription.

[26] In 2019, Ethnologue disabled trial views and introduced a hard paywall to cover its nearly $1 million in annual operating costs (website maintenance, security, researchers, and SIL's 5,000 field linguists).

[9] Users in low and middle-income countries as defined by the World Bank are eligible for free access and there are discounts for libraries and independent researchers.

[1] The introduction of the paywall was harshly criticized by the community of linguists who rely on Ethnologue to do their work and cannot afford the subscription[1] The same year, Ethnologue launched its contributor program to fill gaps and improve accuracy,[28][27] allowing contributors to submit corrections and additions and to get a complimentary access to the website.

From this edition, Ethnologue includes data about first and second languages of refugees, temporary foreign workers and immigrants.

[38] In 2006, computational linguists John C. Paolillo and Anupam Das conducted a systematic evaluation of available information on language populations for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

They described it as a highly valuable catalogue of the world's languages that "has become the standard reference" and whose "usefulness is hard to overestimate".

According to Collin, Ethnologue is "stronger in languages spoken by indigenous peoples in economically less-developed portions of the world" and "when recent in-depth country-studies have been conducted, information can be very good; unfortunately [...] data are sometimes old".

[4] In 2012, linguist Asya Pereltsvaig described Ethnologue as "a reasonably good source of thorough and reliable geographical and demographic information about the world's languages".

[44] In 2017, Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas described Ethnologue as "the most comprehensive global source list for (mostly oral) languages".

[46] According to quantitative linguists Simon Greenhill, Ethnologue offers, as of 2018, "sufficiently accurate reflections of speaker population size".

[47] Linguists Lyle Campbell and Kenneth Lee Rehg wrote in 2018 that Ethnologue was "the best source that list the non-endangered languages of the world".

[50] In a 2021 review of Ethnologue and Glottolog, linguist Shobhana Chelliah noted that "For better or worse, the impact of the site is indeed considerable.

"[53] Similarly, linguist David Bradley describes Ethnologue as "the most comprehensive effort to document the level of endangerment in languages around the world.

[57] In 2005, linguist Harald Hammarström wrote that Ethnologue was consistent with specialist views most of the time and was a catalog "of very high absolute value and by far the best of its kind".

[59][60][61] In 2015, Hammarström reviewed the 16th, 17th, and 18th editions of Ethnologue and described the frequent lack of citations as its only "serious fault" from a scientific perspective.

In contrast, Glottolog provides no language context information but points to primary sources for further data.

[1][65] As of 2019, Hammarström uses Ethnologue in his articles, noting that it "has (unsourced, but) detailed information associated with each speech variety, such as speaker numbers and map location".

[69][70] In her 2021 review, Shobhana Chelliah noted that Glottolog aims to be better than Ethnologue in language classification and genetic and areal relationships by using linguists' original sources.