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ISO 639 is a set of standards by the language and language groups.
It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 (as ISO 639/R)[1] and withdrawn in 2002.[2] The ISO 639 set consists of five parts.
Each part of the standard is maintained by a maintenance agency, which adds codes and changes the status of codes when needed. ISO 639-6 was withdrawn in 2014.[5]
Scopes:
Types (for individual languages):
Bibliographic and terminology codes
The different parts of ISO 639 are designed to work together, in such a way that no code means one thing in one part and something else in another. However, not all languages are in all parts, and there is a variety of different ways that specific languages and other elements are treated in the different parts. This depends, for example, whether a language is listed in parts 1 or 2, whether it has separate B/T codes in part 2, or is classified as a macrolanguage in part 3, and so forth.
These various treatments are detailed in the following chart. The first four columns contain codes for a representative language that exemplifies a specific type of relation between the parts of ISO 639. The last column provides an explanation of the relationship, and the "#" column indicates the number of elements that have that type of relationship. For example, there are four elements that have a code in part 1, have a B/T code, and are classified as macrolanguages in part 3. One representative of these four elements is "Persian" [fas].
These differences are due to the following factors:
de
ger
deu
eng
qaa
qtz
mul
und
zxx
en
ast
aus
"Alpha-2" codes (for codes composed of 2 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet) are used in ISO 639-1. When codes for a wider range of languages were desired, more than 2 letter combinations could cover (a maximum of 262 = 676), ISO 639-2 was developed using Alpha-3 codes (though the latter was formally published first).
"Alpha-3" codes (for codes composed of 3 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet) are used in ISO 639-2, ISO 639-3, and ISO 639-5. The number of languages and language groups that can be so represented is 263 = 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.
mis
qaa-qtz
There are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today.[14] So those 17,029 codes are adequate to assign a unique code to each language, although some languages may end up with arbitrary codes that sound nothing like the traditional name(s) of that language.
"Alpha-4" codes (for codes composed of 4 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet) were proposed to be used in ISO 639-6, which has been withdrawn. The upper limit for the number of languages and dialects that can be represented is 264 = 456,976.
Algonquian languages, Iso 639, Prolog, Sql, Unified Modeling Language
Iso 639, Iso 639-5, Iso 15924, Prolog, Iso 639-3
É, Â, Ö, I, U
Germany, Deutsches Institut für Normung, Berlin, Iso 15924, Prolog
Chinese language, Armenian language, Iso 639, Basque language, Burmese language
Spanish language, Armenian language, Endonym, Greek language, Japanese language