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ISO 639-2

ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. The three-letter codes given for each language in this part of the standard are referred to as "Alpha-3" codes. There are 464 language codes in the list.

The U.S. Library of Congress is the registration authority for ISO 639-2 (referred to as ISO 639-2/RA). As registration authority, the LOC receives and reviews proposed changes; they also have representation on the ISO 639-RA Joint Advisory Committee responsible for maintaining the ISO 639 code tables.

Work was begun on the ISO 639-2 standard in 1989, due to the fact that the ISO 639-1 standard, which gives two-letter codes for languages, would not be able to accommodate a sufficient number of languages. The ISO 639-2 standard was first released in 1998.

While most languages are given one code by the standard, twenty of the languages described have two three-letter codes, a "bibliographic" code (ISO 639-2/B), which is derived from the English name for the language and was a necessary legacy feature, and a "terminological" code (ISO 639-2/T), which is derived from the native name for the language. Each of these twenty languages is also included in the ISO 639-1 standard. (There were 22 B codes; scc and scr are now deprecated.)

In addition, there are codes for special situations:

mis is listed as "uncoded languages"
mul (for multiple languages) is applied when several languages are used and it is not practical to specify all the appropriate language codes
The interval from qaa to qtz is reserved and is not used in the standard
und (for undetermined) is used in situations in which a language or languages must be indicated but the language cannot be identified.
zxx is listed in the code list as "no linguistic content" (added 2006-01-11)

Collective languages

Some ISO 639-2 codes that are commonly used for languages do not precisely represent a particular language or some related languages (as the above macrolanguages). They are regarded as collective languages (or collectives) and are excluded from ISO 639-3.

For a definition of macrolanguages and collective languages see

Collective languages and their ISO 639-2 codes are:

Not obviously a collective in 639-2

bad Banda
bih Bihari (has an ISO 639-1 code)
btk Batak
day Dayak
him Himachali
ijo Ijo
kar Karen
kro Kru
nah Nahuatl
son Songhai
znd Zande

Bihari (bih) is marked as collective but on the other hand has an ISO 639-1 code (bh) which should only be for individual languages. The reason is that individual Bihari languages received an ISO 639-2 code, which makes Bihari a language family for the purposes of ISO 639-2, but a single language for the purposes of ISO 639-1.