ISO 639-1

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ISO 639-1

ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639

ISO 639

ISO 639 is the set of International Organization for Standardization that lists short language code for language names. It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 and withdrawn in 2002....
international-standard

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO , is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations....
language-code

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....
family. It consists of 136 two-letter codes used to identify the world's major languages. These codes are a useful international shorthand for indicating languages. For example:

The ISO 639-1 list became an official standard in 2002, but had existed in draft format for some years before. The last code added was ht, representing Haitian Creole on 2003-02-26.

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Encyclopedia

ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639

ISO 639

International Organization for Standardization

Language code

English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
is represented by en
French
French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
is represented by fr
German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
is represented by de (from the endonym Deutsch)
Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
is represented by ja (even though its endonym is Nihongo)
Portuguese
Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and Portugal. It is derived from the Latin language spoken by the Romanization Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago....
is represented by pt

The ISO 639-1 list became an official standard in 2002, but had existed in draft format for some years before. 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. 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

ISO 639-2

ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 International standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. The three-letter codes given for each language in this part of the standard are referred to as "Alpha-3" codes....
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 Ido Ido is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages....	2002-01-15	art
wa	wln	Wallon Walloon language Walloon is a Romance language spoken as a second language by some in Wallonia, Belgium. It belongs to the langue d'o?l language family, whose most prominent member is the French language, but should not be considered a French dialect: a French speaking person can only understand Walloon with difficulty, especially in its eastern forms....	2002-01-29	roa
li	lim	Limburgish	2002-08-02	gem
ii	iii	Sichuan Yi Yi language Yi is a family of closely related tonal languages Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Yi people. Although linguists still use the term Lolo or Loloish, the Yi people themselves regard it as pejorative....	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

ISO 639-3

ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. The standard describes three-letter codes for identifying languages. It extends the ISO 639-2 alpha-3 codes with an aim to cover all known natural language languages....
).

ISO 639-1

See also

External links