David Eberhard has been the General Editor of the Ethnologue since 2018. Prior to that he was on the faculty of the Linguistics Department at Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he taught Sociolinguistics and Advanced Phonology, and advised numerous student masters theses focused on the sociolinguistic descriptions of Asian language communities. He spent 22 years with SIL in Brazil, where he did field work among the Mamaindê people of the southern Amazon. His holds a PhD in Linguistics from Vrije Universtiteit, Amsterdam, where his dissertation, a descriptive grammar of the Mamaindê language, was completed in 2009. He is the author of over 20 publications, and a co-author of the "Guide for Planning the Future of Our Language," a participatory methodology for community based language development. He has led workshops on community based language development and provided consulting for minority language communities in Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Turkey, Croatia, Nigeria, Uganda, Sao Tome e Principe, USA, and Brazil. His research interests include language ecologies, language shift and maintenance, endangered languages, language development, language vitality assessment, minority languages and digital media, language acquisition of minority languages, and the phonology, morphology and syntax of the Nambiquara language family, of which Mamaindê is a part.
