ISO 639: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 14:09, 26 November 2006

ISO 639 is one of several international standards that list 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

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 639-3 and will eventually be used in 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.

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

@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 ==Alpha-3 code space==
-Since the code is three-letter alphabetic, an upper limit for the number of languages and language collections that can be represented is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576.
+"Alpha-3" codes (for codes composed of 3 letters of the [[basic Latin]] alphabet) are used in ISO 639-2 and 639-3 and will eventually be used in 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 <code>mul</code>, <code>und</code>, <code>mis</code>, <code>zxx</code>, a reserved range <code>qaa-qtz</code> (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.
-A further tighter upper limit can be calculated by subtracting the numbers of language collections from ISO 639-2.
+<!-- A further tighter upper limit can be calculated by subtracting the numbers of language collections from ISO 639-2.  NB- If it is retained, this part might be rewritten to include in a broader overview of the Alpha-3 space. In general as I understand it, most 639-2 codes are also in 639-3-->
 ==See also==