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ISO 639-3
 
 
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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 It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 and withdrawn in 2002....
-3 (ISO 639-3:2007) is an international standard for 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....
s. The standard describes three-letter codes for identifying languages. It extends the 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....
 alpha-3 codes with an aim to cover all known natural
Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is a language that is spoken, Sign language, or writing by humans for general-purpose communication, as distinguished from formal languages and from constructed languages....
 language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
s. The standard was published by ISO on 2007-02-05.

It is intended for use in a wide range of applications, in particular computer systems where many languages need to be supported. It provides an enumeration of languages as complete as possible, including living and extinct, ancient and constructed, major and minor, written and unwritten.






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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 It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 and withdrawn in 2002....
-3 (ISO 639-3:2007) is an international standard for 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....
s. The standard describes three-letter codes for identifying languages. It extends the 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....
 alpha-3 codes with an aim to cover all known natural
Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is a language that is spoken, Sign language, or writing by humans for general-purpose communication, as distinguished from formal languages and from constructed languages....
 language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
s. The standard was published by ISO on 2007-02-05.

It is intended for use in a wide range of applications, in particular computer systems where many languages need to be supported. It provides an enumeration of languages as complete as possible, including living and extinct, ancient and constructed, major and minor, written and unwritten. However, it does not include reconstructed languages such as Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, linguistic reconstruction common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans....
.

It is a superset of ISO 639-1
ISO 639-1

ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 International Organization for Standardization language code family. It consists of 136 two-letter codes used to identify the world's major languages....
 and of the individual languages in 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....
. ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2 focused on major languages, most frequently represented in the total body of the world's literature. Since ISO 639-2 also includes language collections, whereas Part 3 does not, ISO 639-3 is not a superset of ISO 639-2. Where B and T codes exist in ISO 639-2, it uses the T-codes.

Examples:
language639-1639-2 (B/T)type639-3
Englishenengindividual eng
Germandeger/deuindividualdeu
Arabicararamacroarb + several others
Minnan
Min Nan

The Southern Min language, or Min Nan, refers to a family of Chinese dialects which are spoken in southern Fujian and neighboring areas, and by descendants of overseas Chinese in diaspora....
(zh-min-nan) individualnan


The final standard contains 7589 entries. The inventory of languages is based on a number of sources including: the individual languages contained in 639-2, modern languages from the Ethnologue
Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christianity linguistics service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, primarily to provide the speakers with Bibles, in their native language....
 15th edition, historic varieties, ancient languages and artificial languages
Constructed language

A planned or constructed language?known Colloquialism or informally as a conlang?is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary have been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved natural languagely....
 from Anthony Aristar
Anthony Aristar

Anthony Manuel Rodrigues Aristar is a linguist, the founder of the LINGUIST List, the most important linguistic resource on the web , and currently a professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University....
 at the Linguist List
Linguist List

The LINGUIST List is a major online resource for the academic field of linguistics. It was founded by Anthony Aristar in early 1990 at the University of Western Australia....
 as well as languages recommended within a public commenting period.

A transition from ISO 639-1 could be done with List of ISO 639-1 codes
List of ISO 639-1 codes

ISO 639 has five code lists. The following is a list of ISO 639-1 language codes, including the ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 codes where they exist. The data is sorted by 639-1 code....
.

Code space

Since the code is three-letter alphabetic, one upper bound for the number of languages that can be represented is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17576. Since ISO 639-2 defines special codes (4), a reserved range (520) and B-only codes (23), 547 codes cannot be used in part 3. Therefore a lower upper bound is 17576 - 547 = 17030.

The upper bound gets even lower if one subtracts the language collections defined in 639-2 and the ones yet to be defined in ISO 639-5
ISO 639-5

ISO 639-5 , titled "Codes for the representation of names of languages ? Part 5: Alpha-3 code for language families and groups", is an International Organization for Standardization developed by ISO/TC 37/SC 2....
.

Macrolanguages


There are 56 languages in ISO 639-2 which are considered, for the purposes of the standard, to be "macrolanguages" in ISO 639-3 .

Some of these macrolanguages had no individual language as defined by ISO 639-3 in the code set of ISO 639-2, e.g. 'ara' (Generic Arabic). Others like 'nor' (Norwegian) had their two individual parts ('nno' (Nynorsk
Nynorsk

Nynorsk is one of the two official Norwegian language standard languages, the other being Bokm?l. Just above 10% of the Norwegian population use Nynorsk as their primary written language....
), 'nob' (Bokmål
Bokmål

Bokm?l , also known as Riksm?l or Dano-Norwegian, is the more commonly used of the two Norwegian language written standard languages, the other being Nynorsk....
)) already in ISO 639-2.

That means some languages (e.g. 'arb', Standard Arabic) that were considered by ISO 639-2 to be dialects of one language ('ara') are now in ISO 639-3 in certain contexts considered to be individual languages themselves.

This is an attempt to deal with varieties that may be linguistically distinct from each other, but are treated by their speakers as two forms of the same language, e.g. in cases of diglossia
Diglossia

In linguistics, diglossia is a situation where a given language community uses not just one dialect, but two: the first being the community's present day vernacular and the second being either an ancestral version of the same vernacular from centuries earlier or a distinct yet closely related present day dialect ....
.

For example:
  • (Generic Arabic, 639-2)
  • (Standard Arabic, 639-3)


See for the complete list.

Collective languages

Some ISO 639-2 codes that are commonly used for languages do not precisely represent a particular language or some related languages (as the above macrolanguages). They are regarded as collective languages (or collectives) and are excluded from ISO 639-3.

History

Stages :
  • 2006-07-14 FDIS
  • 2007-02-05 60.60


Usage of ISO 639-3

  • lexical markup framework
    Lexical Markup Framework

    Lexical Markup Framework is the ISO International Organization for Standardization ISO/TC37 standard for natural language processing and machine-readable dictionary lexicons....
    , ISO specification that recommend the usage
  • Ethnologue
    Ethnologue

    Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christianity linguistics service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, primarily to provide the speakers with Bibles, in their native language....
    , LinguistList,
  • partially in IETF language tag
  • proposed as language TLD (lcTLD)


See also


External links