- English is represented by en
- Portuguese is represented by pt
- French is represented by fr
- German is represented by de (from the endonym Deutsch)
- Japanese is represented by ja (even though its endonym is Nihongo)
The ISO 639-1 list became an official standard in 2002, but had existed in draft format for some years before. The last code added was ht, representing Haitian Creole on 2003-02-26. The use of the standard was encouraged by IETF language tags, introduced in RFC 1766 in March 1995, and continued by RFC 3066 from January 2001 and RFC 4646 from September 2006. Infoterm (International Information Center for Terminology) is the registration authority for ISO 639-1 codes.
New ISO 639-1 codes are not added if an ISO 639-2 code exists, so systems that use ISO 639-1 and 639-2 codes, with 639-1 codes preferred, do not have to change existing codes.
If an ISO 639-2 code that covers a group of languages is used, it might be overridden for some specific languages by a new ISO 639-1 code.
| ISO 639-1 | ISO 639-2 | Name | Date added | Previously covered by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| io | ido | Ido | 2002-01-15 | art |
| wa | wln | Wallon | 2002-01-29 | roa |
| li | lim | Limburgish | 2002-08-02 | gem |
| ii | iii | Sichuan Yi | 2002-10-14 | sit |
| an | arg | Aragonese | 2002-12-23 | roa |
| ht | hat | Haitian Creole | 2003-02-26 | cpf |
There is no specification on treatment of macrolanguages (see ISO 639-3).
See also
References
External links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Friday July 18, 2008 at 21:30:35 PDT (GMT -0700)
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ISO 639 consists of different parts, of which two parts have been approved and a third part that is in the final approval (FDIS) stage. The other parts are works in progress.
- ISO 639-1:2002 Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 1: Alpha-2 code; List of ISO 639-1 codes
- ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 2: Alpha-3 code; List of ISO 639-2 codes
- ISO 639-3:2007 Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages; List of ISO 639-3 codes
- ISO/CD 639-4:2008? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 4: Implementation guidelines and general principles for language coding
- ISO 639-5:2008 Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 5: Alpha-3 code for language families and groups; May 15, 2008
- ISO/CD 639-6:2008? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 6: Alpha-4 representation for comprehensive coverage of language variation
Use of ISO 639 codes
The language codes defined in the several sections of ISO 639 are used for bibliographic purposes and, in computing and internet environments, as a key element of locale data. The codes also find use in various applications, such as Wikipedia URLs for its different language editions.Alpha-2 code space
"Alpha-2" codes (for codes composed of 2 letters of the basic Latin alphabet) are used in ISO 639-1. Thus, there are distinct Alpha-2 codes. This is clearly insufficient to cover all languages, which led to the creation of ISO 639-2 and the use of Alpha-3 codes.Alpha-3 code space
"Alpha-3" codes (for codes composed of 3 letters of the basic Latin alphabet) are used in ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 and will eventually be used in ISO 639-5. Mathematically, the upper limit for the number of languages and language collections that can be so represented is .The common use of Alpha-3 codes by three parts of ISO 639 requires some coordination within a larger system.
Part 2 defines four special codes mul, und, mis, zxx, a reserved range qaa-qtz (20 × 26 = 520 codes) and has 23 double entries (the B/T codes). This sums up to 520 + 23 + 4 = 547 codes that cannot be used in part 3 to represent languages or in part 5 to represent language families or groups.
The remainder is 17,576 – 547 = 17,029.
There are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today 
So those 17,029 codes are adequate to assign a unique code to each language, although some languages may end up with arbitrary codes that sound nothing like traditional name(s) of that language.
Alpha-4 code space
"Alpha-4" codes (for codes composed of 4 letters of the basic Latin alphabet) is proposed to be used in ISO 639-6. Mathematically, the upper limit for the number of languages and dialects that can be so represented is .See also
- list of ISO 639-1 codes
- list of ISO 639-2 codes
- list of ISO 639-3 codes
- language code
- language families and languages
- list of languages
- list of official languages
- ISO 3166 (codes for countries)
- ISO 15924 (codes for writing systems)
- IETF language tags (based on ISO 639)
External links
- ISO 639-2 Registration Authority
- XML version of the official ISO 639-2 HTML data from the Library of Congress
- ISO 639-3 Registration Authority
- ISO 639 and the Ethnologue
- Language codes in English and Italian with Perl scripts for parsing and PHP code
- British Standards Institute
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday July 03, 2008 at 09:06:40 PDT (GMT -0700)
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