SIL International is a faith-based nonprofit organization committed to serving language communities worldwide as they build capacity for sustainable language development. SIL does this primarily through research, translation, training and materials development. SIL works alongside ethnolinguistic communities and their partners as they discover how language development addresses the challenging areas of their daily lives—social, cultural, political, economic and spiritual.

Founded in 1934, SIL (originally known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc.) has grown from a small summer linguistics training program with two students to a staff of over 4,800,  from 84 countries. Currently SIL works alongside speakers of more than 1,700 languages in over 100 countries. The organization makes its services available to all, without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race or ethnolinguistic background.