ISO 639-1

These codes are a useful international, and formal, shorthand for indicating languages. For example:

• English is represented by en
• French is represented by fr
• German is represented by de (from the endonym Deutsch)
• Japanese is represented by ja (even though its endonym is Nihongo)
• Portuguese is represented by pt
• Spanish is represented by es (from the endonym español)
• Catalan is represented by ca (from the endonym Català)

ISO 639, the original standard for language codes, was approved in 1967. It was split into parts, and in 2002 ISO 639-1 became the new revision of the original standard. 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. The current version is RFC 5646 from September 2009. 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 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 2002-01-15 art
wa wln Wallon 2002-01-29 roa
li lim Limburgish 2002-08-02 gem
ii iii Sichuan Yi 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).

See also

• List of ISO 639-1 codes

References

1. ^ ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee - Working principles for ISO 639 maintenance

External links

• ISO 639-1/RA
• ISO 639-2 Registration Authority FAQ

ISO 639 and ISO 639 macrolanguage





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