When someone encounters Scripture, worship, and learning in the language they know best, it changes how they pray, how they raise their children, and how they build their community’s future.
“It is good to be near God.”
– Psalm 73:28 (NIV)
Who We Are
When someone encounters Scripture, worship, and learning in the language they know best, it changes how they pray, how they raise their children, and how they build their community’s future.
Join us in this work.
How We Work
Our work starts with local communities, their churches, and organizations. They share their needs and goals with us, which are different for every country, culture, and community. Then we work with them to reach those goals. Today we're working with over 1,500 language communities.
Language Communities
In all of our work, we apply the values we hold dear:
Love God and his Word
Live as stewards
Work in relationships
Honor communities
Believe every language has worth
See the people behind every language
Our faith both inspires our work and informs how we do it. We believe all people are created by God and given language as a means for deep connection.
Our History
In 1917, a young American named Cameron Townsend traveled through Guatemala selling Spanish Bibles. But when he offered Spanish Bibles to people who only spoke Kakchikel, their questions brought him up short. Why didn’t God speak their language?
Townsend heard more than a challenge. He heard a conviction: that deep connection with God should not be gated by the language you speak.
Townsend spent the next decade learning Kaqchikel alongside the community — and the rest of his life building the organization that would become SIL, dedicated to partnering with local communities so they could encounter God in the languages of their deepest identity.
That conviction has never changed. Over the past 90 years, we have grown into a global community rooted in local realities, actively partnering with communities all over the world.
What We Do
We both assist and run translation projects. We offer services like translation checking, training, and more.
We train people in a wide range of our expertise like linguistics, education, literacy, trauma healing, and more.
We produce and share specialized products like fonts, analytics tools, translation software, and more.
We carry out research to understand people's language and culture. We also design new solutions with communities.
We develop, localize, and publish materials both about and in local languages.
We raise awareness for communities and the language policies that support them.
Why Language?
