About the SIL-Mexico website

• Purpose
• Editorial policies
• Hardware and software requirements
• Editorial committee

Purpose

The main purpose of the SIL-Mexico website is to publish information related to the languages and cultures of present-day Mexico, including both indigenous (Indian) languages and signed languages. It serves as one of the primary publication outlets for the research and service activities conducted by the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (Summer Institute of Linguistics) in the country.

Although the indigenous groups of Mexico have a long history stretching back thousands of years, the primary focus of this site is on their modern situation: their languages and cultures as they exist today and in the recent past. (There are, however, a few materials that take a historical perspective.)

Some of the material has been prepared primarily for use by native speakers, but we anticipate it will be of interest to others as well. Other material is more specialized and will primarily be of interest to linguists and anthropologists. Some items first appeared in printed form and are being republished here; others were written especially for the web.

The site also serves some secondary purposes, providing a means of distributing information about the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, linguistic courses that it offers, and materials for learning and teaching linguistics.

Editorial policies

Although the SIL-Mexico website is a part of the SIL International website, it is also somewhat independent from it. It is developed and maintained by a separate editorial committee, and certain features of it (notably the use of Spanish in all the structural pages and many of the content pages) do not characterize the SIL International website as a whole.

New information and materials are being added regularly to the site (see the What's New page). Most authors whose work appears on this website are members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, but the site also benefits from the contributions of others.

Much of the material on the website is fully published. Such material is first reviewed and recommended by peers, checked for accuracy and validity, and proofread (in both English and Spanish) before publication. Fully published material on this site must meet the same standards of quality that apply to print publication. If errors remain, please inform the editorial committee.

Hardware and software requirements

We have tried to create web pages that display well on a wide range of browsers and computers. The core interface pages are designed to function reasonably well even on slow modem connections; major publications such as dictionaries, however, are of necessity sometimes quite large (over 1 Mb).

Many pages look best in browsers that provide good support for newer technologies such as HTML 4.0, CSS (cascading style sheets), and Dynamic HTML. (For example: Internet Explorer 4 and above, and to a lesser extent versions of Netscape Navigator released since mid-1999.) All information should be readable and usable in older browsers, as long as they support tables (version 3 browsers and above).

Graphics are sized to look good at a screen setting of between 640x480 and 1024x768 pixels.

Materials that require special fonts are generally presented in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, so that fonts can be embedded in the document file and no separate download and installation is required. On some HTML pages, certain special characters are rendered by small graphics, and these can look odd when the text size in the browser is different from that of the graphics. (On those few HTML pages that require you to download a font for proper viewing, instructions for downloading and installing it are prominently displayed.)

If you encounter problems viewing any of the materials on the site, please let us know which pages you are having trouble with, what the problem is, and what type of computer and browser you are using.

Editorial committee

• Loren Hawthorne, supervisor of publications
• David Tuggy, website coordinator
• Joseph Benton, editor for anthropology
• Albert Bickford, editor for linguistics
• Mary Hopkins, editor for literacy
• Stephen Marlett