Language code

A language code is a code that assigns letters or numbers as identifiers for languages. These codes are often used to organize library collections, to choose the correct localizations and translations in computing, and as a shorthand designation for forms.

Contents 1 Difficulties of classification 2 Common schemes 3 See also 4 External links 5 References

[edit] Difficulties of classification

Language code schemes attempt to classify within the complex world of human languages, dialects, and variants. Most schemes make some compromises between being general complete enough to support specific dialects.

For example, most people in Central America and South America speak Spanish. Spanish spoken in Mexico will be slightly different from Spanish spoken in Peru. Different regions of Mexico will have slightly different dialects and accents of Spanish. A language code scheme might group these all as "Spanish" for choosing a keyboard layout, most as "Spanish" for general usage, or separate each dialect to allow region-specific idioms.

[edit] Common schemes

Some common language code schemes include:

Scheme	Notes	Examples
		Codes for English	Codes for Spanish
ISO 639	The original ISO standard from 1967 to 2002. Now obsolete, it was replaced by ISO 639-1, ISO 639-2, and ISO 639-3. Sometimes used as a shorthand for the union of all 639 standard codes.	en – two-letter code eng – three-letter code enm – Middle English, ca. 1100–1500 ang – Old English, ca. 450–1100 cpe – other English-based creoles and pidgins EN – English or American two-letter capital code (source: Library of Congress[1])	esl – three-letter code spa – alternative three-letter code ES – Spanish two-letter capital code
ISO 639-1	Two-letter code system made official in 2002, containing 136 codes. Many systems use two-letter ISO 639-1 codes supplemented by three-letter ISO 639-2 codes when no two-letter code is applicable.	en (from List of ISO 639-1 codes)	es – Spanish
ISO 639-2	Three-letter system of 464 codes.	eng – three-letter code enm – Middle English, ca. 1100–1500 ang – Old English, ca. 450–1100 cpe – other English-based creoles and pidgins (from List of ISO 639-2 codes)	spa – Spanish
ISO 639-3	An extension of ISO 639-2 to cover all known, living or dead, spoken or written languages in 7,589 entries.	eng – three-letter code enm – Middle English, ca. 1100–1500 aig – Antigua and Barbuda Creole English ang – Old English, ca. 450–1100 svc – Vincentian Creole English others (from List of ISO 639-3 codes)	spa – Spanish spq – Spanish, Loreto-Ucayali ssp – Spanish sign language others
Old SIL codes	Codes created for use in the Ethnologue, a publication of SIL International that lists language statistics. The publication now uses ISO 639-3 codes.		SPN
IETF language tag	An IETF best practice, currently specified by RFC 5646 and RFC 4647, for language tags easy to parse by computer. The tag system is extensible to region, dialect, and private designations.	en – English, as shortest ISO 639 code. en-US – English as used in the United States (US is the ISO 3166-1 country code for the United States) en-US-x-fandom – English with private subtag (source: IETF memo[2])	es – Spanish, as shortest ISO 639 code. es-419 – Spanish appropriate for the Latin America and Caribbean region, using the UN region code
Verbix Language Codes	Constructed codes starting with old SIL codes and adding more information.[3]

[edit] See also

• Country code
• Ethnologue (SIL code)
• HTML Accept-Language header
• IETF language tag
• ISO 639
• ISO, SIL, and BCP language codes for constructed languages
• Linguasphere language code

[edit] External links

• Language Tags in HTML and XML
• Language Identifiers in the Markup Context

[edit] References

1. ^ ISO 639 Language Codes, Library of Congress
2. ^ Best Current Practice – Tags for Identifying Languages, IETF
3. ^ Verbix language codes, verbix.com

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