ISO 639

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ISO 639 is the set of international standards that lists short codes for language names.

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/FDIS 639-3: 2006? 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: 2007? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 4: Implementation guidelines and general principles for language coding
ISO/DIS 639-5: 2007? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 5: Alpha-3 code for language families and groups
ISO/CD 639-6: 2007? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 6: Alpha-4 representation for comprehensive coverage of language variation

1 Use of ISO-639 codes
2 Alpha-2 code space
3 Alpha-3 code space
4 Alpha-4 code space
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] 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.

[edit] Alpha-2 code space

"Alpha-2" codes (for codes composed of 2 letters of the basic Latin alphabet) are used in ISO 639-1. Mathematically, the upper limit for the number of languages and language collections that can be so represented is 26 × 26 = 676. This is clearly insufficient to cover all languages, which led to the creation of ISO 639-2 and the use of Alpha-3 codes.

[edit] 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 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576.

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.

[edit] Alpha-4 code space

"Alpha-4" codes (for codes composed of 4 letters of the basic Latin alphabet) will be used in ISO 639-6. Mathematically, the upper limit for the number of languages and dialects that can be so represented is 26 × 26 × 26 × 26 = 456,976.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

RFC 4646, Tags for Identifying Languages, Best Current Practice, September 2006
RFC 3066, Tags for the Identification of Languages, Best Current Practice, January 2001—obsoleted by RFC 4646, above
ISO 639-3 Registration Authority
ISO 639 and the Ethnologue
Language codes in English and Italian with Perl scripts for parsing and PHP code
XML version of the official ISO 639-2 HTML data from the Library of Congress
GeoLang — a linguistic research and standardization company working on the ISO 639-6 project
ICT Marketing — in collaboration with GeoLang and BSI on ISO 639-6 language coding project
British Standards Institute
explanation by Håvard Hjulstad af:ISO 639