ISO 639-1

ISO 639-1:2002, Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 1: Alpha-2 code, is the first part of the ISO 639 series of international standards for language codes. Part 1 covers the registration of two-letter codes. There are 136 two-letter codes registered. The registered codes cover the world's major languages.

These codes are a useful international, and formal, shorthand for indicating languages. For example:

• English is represented by en
• Italian is represented by it
• 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)
• Portuguese is represented by pt
• Spanish is represented by es (from the endonym español)
• Catalan is represented by ca (from the endonym Català)

ISO 639, the original standard for language codes, was approved in 1967. It was split into parts, and in 2002 ISO 639-1 became the new revision of the original standard. 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. The current version is RFC 5646 from September 2009. 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 codes added after RFC publication in January 2001

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).

List of codes

ISO 639 is a standardized nomenclature used to classify all known languages. Each language is assigned a 3 letter abbreviation, amended in later versions of the nomenclature. The system is highly useful for linguists and ethnographers to categorize the languages spoken on a regional basis, and to compute analysis in the field of lexicostatistics. ISO 639 has five code lists.

This table lists all of:

• ISO 639-1: two-letter codes, one per language or macrolanguage

And some of:

• ISO 639-2/T: three-letter codes, for the same languages as 639-1
• ISO 639-2/B: three-letter codes, mostly the same as 639-2/T, but with some codes derived from English names rather than native names of languages. In the following table, these differing codes are highlighted in boldface.
• ISO 639-3: three-letter codes, the same as 639-2/T for languages, but with distinct codes for each dialect of macrolanguages

External links

• Official web site for ISO 639
• Official ISO 639 list
• ISO 639-1/RA
• ISO 639-2 Registration Authority FAQ