Home progressbible

Bible translation milestone: Under 1,000 languages left to start

For the first time in history, the list of languages that still need Bible translation to begin is less than 1,000.

According to ProgressBible, the entity that tracks global Scripture access statistics, as of 1 September, just 985 languages remain to be started. Those represent just 29.3 million people – less than 1 percent of the global population. For comparison, that is less than the 33-million population of the world’s second-largest city, Delhi, India.

That’s a huge decrease from the waiting list of 1,892 languages and 145.2 million people just three years ago. About 100 million of that reduction occurred in Asia, thanks to several major languages in sensitive areas being started.

It's all a large step within Vision 2025—a vision adopted in 1999 for Bible translation to be started in this generation for every language that still needs it. Some organisations have used the year 2025 as a specific goal, while others see Vision 2025 as more of a general challenge.

Christy Liner, director of partnerships for SIL and the former program director for ProgressBible, remembers forecasting in 2020 that Bible translation starting in every remaining language was still decades away. And there are still significant barriers, including most of the world’s 392 known sign languages, or languages in difficult-access regions like east Asia.

‘But if you just look at it as a whole,’ she says, ‘in a way it actually feels like maybe it’s within reach. Maybe it’s not so crazy. And it used to feel like there was just no way. So that’s exciting.’

Twenty more complete Bibles were finished in the past year, bringing the global total to 756. That means 6 billion people now have the full Bible in the language they know best. And 7.3 billion people now have some Scripture in their language—up to 97.3 percent of the global population. Add the people in language communities already served by another language commonly spoken there, and 99.5 percent of all people worldwide either have some Scripture or work in their language is underway.

New projects

Also this year, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s 7,396 living languages have Bible translation work occurring. For some it is the first time; many others are working toward a complete Bible and others are revising previous work. Among that translation progress, Wycliffe Global Alliance organisations are working in at least 3,146 languages in 146 countries.

With so many new projects in the past three years, one category that ProgressBible tracks is especially visible: ‘Work in progress, no Scripture yet.’ It means groundwork is being laid in those languages. Translation and engagement teams are being formed, usually involving local communities and churches. The category now includes 1,524 languages— up an astounding 84 percent since 2021. Better yet, almost 136 million people speak those languages — double the same statistic from three years ago.

A changing picture

One country seeing the impact of this acceleration is Nigeria. Until this year, it had ranked among the top five countries or language groups needing translation to begin, along with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, east Asia and global Deaf communities. Now, Nigeria has been replaced on that list by Cameroon.

Terry Dehart, data analyst for ProgressBible, wonders if there even needs to be a list like that any more. Cameroon is one of several countries with similar remaining needs.

‘That’s a sign of real progress, where you don’t really have five huge targets,’ he says—adding that it also indicates perhaps the biggest challenges yet.

‘When I look at the numbers, I don’t expect Vision 2025 to hit zero in 2025,’ he adds. ‘The low-hanging fruit has been picked. We’re down to the hard ones.

‘When you look at East Asia, it’s flat. There’s been almost no change since 2020. And we need a movement of God, full stop. We’ve done everything we can think of and it’s flat. So now what? We need God to intervene.’

Additional story: Nigeria's rapid rise

Christy Liner and Terry Dehart of SIL and ProgressBible

Better numbers

Measurement of global Scripture access has evolved significantly as better information has been acquired. As the list gets smaller, there’s less potential for duplication of effort.

‘This is where we’re saying, OK, it is really important that what’s on there is good information, because organisations are starting to bump into each other quite a bit more’, Liner says. ‘It used to be there was just such an abundance of need out there that organisations didn’t even realise another organisation was working in the same country.

When ProgressBible was created in 2016, statisticians began with the assumption that every known language needed Scripture. More recently, in a ‘Data Sharpening Initiative’, they have realised this isn’t always true. For instance, Liner says, if children are no longer speaking a language, that’s a reliable indicator that the language may disappear in the next generation. It may be removed from the list of languages needing Bible translation to begin. And, when consulted, ProgressBible might also recommend that Bible translation movements focus their efforts on vital languages still being spoken by children.

‘The Data Sharpening Initiative was just an attempt to start to collect better information on every language,’ she says, ‘so that we can really try to highlight where the real needs do exist and hopefully divert energies, organisational energies, to those languages where there are actual needs.’

Dehart adds: ‘A significant part of what we’re trying to do is give the best information so people can make the best decisions and actually cooperate with each other.’

A leading indicator

Both Liner and Dehart were quick to point out that the existence of Scripture in a given language does not automatically mean impact.

“The real goal is people being moved and transformed by the gospel’, Liner says. ‘Whereas Vision 2025 is really just potentially a leading indicator.’

‘I’m a numbers guy’, Dehart says. ‘I’ve managed projects. I like to see incremental progress. It’s great that we’ve started in these places. We need to see incremental progress toward the goal and the end goal. … We want to see people actually engaging with the Scripture, having it transform their lives, having it transform the culture. But as a project manager, you also want to see, OK, are we getting there? I don’t want a surprise at the end. … And that’s one of the shifts that I’m seeing in ProgressBible is we’re starting to measure that incremental progress.

•••

Story: Jim Killam, Wycliffe Global Alliance

MORE:

Our full report on 2024 Scripture access statistics — including downloadable infographics
Listen to the full interview with Christy Liner and Terry Dehart on The Journey Podcast.

News

View all articles

Special Report - May 2025

‘We’ve come very far, very fast’

A tech observer outlines what AI will mean soon for workplaces and ministry

Tech pioneer: Christians ‘have to show up’ for AI

Silicon Valley pioneer Pat Gelsinger was CEO of Intel Corporation until December 2024. Quickly realising his career in technology was not finished, he joined the faith/tech platform Gloo in early 2025 as the executive chair and head of technology. He is also a general partner at the venture capital firm Playground Global. Gelsinger was instrumental in the development of cloud computing, Wi-Fi, USB and many other everyday technologies. He estimates his work has touched 60 to 70 percent of humanity. Here are highlights of his keynote talk at the 2025 Missional AI Summit. You can watch his entire talk here. Pat Gelsinger (left) is interviewed onstage by Steele Billings. Both are with Gloo. Watch the full interview here. Is technology good or bad? Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s neutral. It can be used for good. It can be used for bad. … If you think back to the Roman roads, why did Christ come when he came? I’ll argue the Pax Romana and the Roman roads. … The greatest technology of the day was the Roman road system. It was used so the Word could go out. Historical example I will argue Martin Luther was the most significant figure of the last thousand years. And what did he do? He used the greatest piece of technology available at the day, the Gutenberg printing press. He created Bibles. … He broke, essentially, the monopoly on the Bible translations …. He ushered in education. He created the systems that led to the Renaissance. That’s a little punk monk who only wanted to get an audience with the pope because he thought he had a few theological errors. I’ll argue (Luther was) the most significant figure of the last thousand years, using technology to improve the lives of every human that he touched at the time. How today compares to the dawn of the internet AI is more important. AI will be more significant. AI will be more dramatic. … This is now incredibly useful, and we’re going to see AI become just like the internet, where every single interaction will be infused with AI capabilities. In the 75-year-or-so history of computing, we humans have been adapting to the computer. … With AI, computers adapt to us. We talk to them. They hear us. They see us for the first time. And now they are becoming a user interface that fits with humanity. And for this and so many other reasons that every technology has been building on the prior technology, AI will unquestionably be the biggest of these waves, more impactful even than the internet was. On the need for AI development to be open-source It is so critical because we’re embedding knowledge, embedding values, embedding understanding into those underlying models, large language models and every aspect that happens. It must be open, and this is part of what I think is critical about us being together here today. We need to be creating trusted, open, useful AI that we can build humanity on. On the need for Christians to help build AI systems We have to show up as the faith community to be influencing those outcomes, because remember what happened in the social media. We didn’t show up, and look at what we got. So are we going to miss this opportunity for something that’s far more important than social networking with AI? Where it truly in the models embeds every aspect of human history and values into it? We have to show up, team. What we do with large language models is far more important because truly we are choosing how we embody knowledge of all time into those underlying models. They need to be open. They need to be trusted. What Christians must bring to the process If we’re going to show up to influence AI broadly, we have to show up with good engineering, good data, good understanding, good frameworks. How do you measure things like ‘Is that leading to better character? Is that leading to better relationships? Is that creating better vocational outcomes? Is that a valid view of a spiritual perspective?’ We need good underlying data associated with each one of these. And for that we’re actively involved. We’re driving to create that underlying data set. Because we need to show up with good data if we’re going to influence how AI is created. How should this work? For the AI systems we need to create good benchmarks. If I ask about God, does it give me a good answer or not? If I ask about relationships with my children, does it give me good answers? We need to create the corpus of data to give good answers to those questions. And, armed with that good data, we need to show up to influence the total landscape of AI. We want to benchmark OpenAI. We’re going to benchmark Gemini. We’re going to benchmark Claude. We’re going to benchmark Copilot. This is what we’re going to do at Gloo, but we want to be part of a broader community in that discussion so that we’re influential in creating flourishing AI. Technology is a force for good. AI that truly embeds the values that we care about, that we want to honour, that we want to be representing into the future and benchmarking across all of them. Oh his role with Gloo We are going to change the landscape of the faith community and its role in shaping this most critical technology, AI, for faith and flourishing. That’s what we’re going to do at Gloo and we need all of your help and partnership to do so because if we don’t hang together, we’re not going to influence the outcome, right? ‘Here am I, Lord’ I don’t think I’m done. … You and I both need to come to the same position like Isaiah did. Here am I, Lord. Send me. Send me. Send us. That we can be shaping technology as a force for good. That we could grab this moment in time. This is the greatest time to live in human history. We’re going to solve diseases. We’re going to improve lives. We’re going to educate every person in poverty. We are going to solve climate issues. We are going to be using these technologies to improve the lives of every human on the planet. We are going to shape technology as a force for good. Here am I, Lord. Send me. ••• Story: Jim Killam, Wycliffe Global Alliance Translated with ChatGPT. How was the translation accuracy? Let us know at info@wycliffe.net. Alliance organisations are welcome to download and use images from this series.