ISO 639

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ISO 639 is one of several international standards that list short codes for language names. The Ethnologue started using ISO 639-3 codes with the 15th edition.

ISO 639 consists of different parts, of which two parts are currently published. The other parts are works in progress.

There are two items for ISO 639:

• ISO 639-1: 2002 Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 1: Alpha-2 code
• ISO 639-2: 1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 2: Alpha-3 code

The following parts are still being developed:

• ISO 639-3: 2006? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages [1]
• ISO 639-4: 2007? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 4: Implementation guidelines and general principles for language coding
• ISO 639-5: 2006? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 5: Alpha-3 code for language families and groups
• ISO 639-6: 2007? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 6: Alpha-4 representation for comprehensive coverage of language variation

Alpha-3 code space

Since the code is three letter alphabetic one upper bound for the number of languages and language collections that can be represented is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17 576. Part 2 defines two special codes mul, und, a reserved range qaa-qtz (500 codes) and has 23 double entries (the B/T codes). This sums up to 545 codes that cannot be used in part 3 to represent languages or in part 5 to represent language collections. The remainder is 17 576 - 545 = 17 032.

See also

• list of ISO 639 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)

External links

• RFC 3066, Tags for the Identification of Languages, Best Current Practice, January 2001
• 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
• Linguasphere — a linguistic research company and press working on the ISO 639-6 project
• ICT Marketing — in collaboration with Linguasphere and BSI on ISO 639-6 language coding project
• British Standards Institute
• explanation by Håvard Hjulstadaf:ISO 639

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