Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English volume

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.

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

^* 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).

^** 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).

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.