[2] Its main offices in the United States are located at the International Linguistics Center in Dallas, Texas.

William Cameron Townsend, a Presbyterian minister, founded the organization in 1934, after undertaking a Christian mission with the Disciples of Christ among the Kaqchikel Maya people in Guatemala in the early 1930s.

Because the Mexican government did not allow missionary work through its educational system, Townsend founded Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1942 as a separate organization from SIL.

[5] Having initiated collaboration with the Mexican education authorities, Townsend started the institute as a small summer training-session in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, in 1934 to train missionaries in basic linguistic, anthropological, and translation principles.

One of the students at the first summer institute in its second year, 1935, Kenneth Lee Pike (1912–2000), would become the foremost figure in the history of SIL.

[6] SIL's principal contribution to linguistics has been the data that have been gathered and analyzed from over 1,000 minority and endangered languages,[7] many of which had not been previously studied academically.

SIL assists local, regional, and national agencies that are developing formal and informal education in vernacular languages.

These cooperative efforts enable new advances in the complex field of educational development in multilingual and multicultural societies.

[11] SIL provides instructors and instructional materials for linguistics programs at several major institutions of higher learning around the world.

The creation of this department reflects a growing interest in documenting endangered languages and incorporates a multidisciplinary approach of anthropology and linguistics.

With the publication of the 17th edition (2016), Ethnologue launched a subscription service, but claiming that the paywall would only affect 5% of users.

[50] UNESCO Literacy Prizes have been awarded to SIL's work in a number of countries: Australia (1969), Cameroon (1986), Papua New Guinea (1979), Philippines (1991).

[61][60] SIL considers itself as actively protecting endangered languages by promoting them within the speech community and providing mother-tongue literacy training.