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ISO 639

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ISO 639 is one of several international standards that list short codes for language names. Since the 15th editions the Ethnologue that formerly used separate codes started using ISO 639-3 codes.

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 639-42007? 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:?? Codes for the representation of names of languages -- Part 6: Alpha-? code (Possible NWIP)

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

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