Revision as of 08:57, 9 January 2010

International union for the scientific study of population

Multilingual

DEMOGRAPHIC

Dictionary

ENGLISH SECTION

Second edition

adapted by

Etienne van de Walle

from the French

Section edited by

Louis Henry

Foreword

The Population Commission of the United Nations in its fourth session requested the UN Secretariat to include the preparation of a multilingual demographic dictionary in its work programme. The Union offered to collaborate in this project, and at the end of the fifth session of the Population Commission an ad hoc Committee* was given the task of drafting a multilingual demographic dictionary in English, French and Spanish.

Notwithstanding its great complexity, this work was successfully completed and the French and English volumes were published in 1958. Other versions appeared later: Spanish (1959), Italian (1959), German (1960), Finnish (1964), Russian (1964), Czech (1965), Polish (1966), Swedish (1969), Portuguese (1969), Arabic (1970) and Serbo-Croatian (1971).

At its fifteenth session, held in Geneva in November 1969, the Population Commission of the United Nations adopted a recommendation suggesting that the U.N. Secretary-General should collaborate closely with the Union in carrying out projects of mutual interest, such as the preparation of a multilingual dictionary of demographic terms.

At a previous meeting in Liege in April 1969, the Council of the Union noted with great satisfaction that the dictionary had, in every respect, come up to the expectations of demographers all over the world; the Council felt, however, that the time had come to bring the dictionary up to date, in view of the profound changes which had affected the science of demography during the decade following its publication.

^* Multilingual Demographic Dictionary Committee : Chairman : P. Vincent (France), Members: C.E. Dieulefait (Argentina), H.F. Dorn (U.S.A.), E.Grebenik (Great Britain), P. Luzzato-Fegiz (Italy), M. Pascua (Switzerland), J. Ros Jimeno(Spain).

A new Committee^* was therefore set up, and thanks to the generous financial aid granted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, work on the project was started in 1972 and completed in 1974.

The Committee's field of action was not limited to its members, since a hundred or so demographic centres responded to its appeal by giving their comments on the drafts submitted to them, In this way, an immense documentation was collected which dealt not only with the definitions of demographic terms and concepts, but also with the arrangement of the book. All this was placed at the disposal of Professor Louis Henry, to whom in 1976 the Union entrusted the task of editing the final version of the second French edition of the demographic multilingual dictionary. Thus the new text prepared by Louis Henry is a synthesis of the one edited by the late regretted Paul Vincent for the first edition of the French version, and the texts prepared by the Committee on International Demographic Terminology.

The Union subsequently requested Professor Etienne van de Walle to adapt and translate the French version of the dictionary into English. I would like to take this opportunity of thanking him warmly for having successfully carried out such a very exacting task.

I also wish to expess my deep gratitude to my predecessor, Professor Massimo Livi Bacci who, during his mandate, was one of the principal promoters of this new series of dictionaries,

This English edition, following on the French one, is thus the second in a collection which will continue to increase as time goes on and provide support to the international community of demographers.

Georges Tapinos Secretary-General

^* Committee on International Demographic Terminology: Chairman: P. Paillat (France); Members: A. Boyarski (U.S,S.R.), E. Grebenik (Great Britain), K. Mayer (Switzerland), J. Nadal (Spain), S. Kono (United Nations-Japan); Observers: S. Baum and J. Siegel (U.S. Bureau of the Census — U.S.A.); Research Assistants: A. Hill (Great Britain), A. Lifshitz (France) and A. Saez (Spain).

Notes on the use of the dictionary

The dictionary consists of a text supplemented by notes in small type and an alphabetical index. All terms which are printed in bold face in the text and the notes are listed in the index. Where an expression consisting of several words is printed in bold face it will appear in the index under each of the principal constituent words, e.g., "density of population" is indexed under D as "DENSITY population", and under P as "POPULATION density".

Each term has a reference number which is composed of the number of the paragraph in which it appears and an identification number. For terms appearing in the body of the text the identification number is printed immediately after the term, and for those in the notes it is the number of the note; the latter also relates the note to the corresponding term in the text. Terms occurring in the notes which are not in the text are starred in the index and reference numbers.

Text terms with the same reference numbers in the various sections of the dictionary correspond to one another. For instance, the translator who wishes to find the equivalent French term for a given expression in English should look up the English expression in the alphabetical index of the English section and find the correspondingly numbered paragraph in the French section. It is strongly recommended that the whole paragraph in which the expression occurs in both sections should be read in order to guard against faulty translation due to slight differences in usage; this will also be useful if, in one of the languages, no term exists to express a particular concept.

Different terms which are used to express the same concept have the same reference number. Any term which is susceptible of different interpretations may have two or more reference numbers which refer to the appropriate contexts.

ABBREVIATIONS: adj. adjective ; n. noun ; v. verb.

Acknowledgements

Although many persons have contributed to various stages of the preparation of this dictionary, Etienne van de Walle would like to acknowledge the assistance of Alex Mogielnicki in translating the French version, and the advice of his colleagues, Ann R.Miller, Samuel H. Preston, Norman Ryder and Christopher Tietze who were kind enough to comment on initial versions of the English text. It owes of course a great deal to the First Edition, and to the preliminary texts prepared by the committee of the Union.