ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code 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:
- English is represented by en
- German is represented by de (from the native name Deutsch)
- Japanese is represented by ja (even though its native name is Nihongo)
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 RFC 1766 from March 1995, and continued by RFC 3066 from January 2001. Infoterm 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.
See note in RFC 3066 section 2.3 Choice of language tag:
- "After the publication of ISO/DIS 639-1 as an International
- Standard, no new 2-letter code shall be added to ISO 639-1 unless a
- 3-letter code is also added at the same time to ISO 639-2. In
- addition, no language with a 3-letter code available at the time of
- publication of ISO 639-1 which at that time had no 2-letter code
- shall be subsequently given a 2-letter code."
If a ISO 639-2 code that covers a group of languages is used, it may still be obsoleted for some data by a new ISO 639-1 code.
Codes added after RFC publication in January 2001:
| ISO 639-1 |
ISO 639-2 |
Name |
Change date |
Change type |
previously covered by |
| io |
ido |
Ido |
2002-01-15 |
Add |
art |
| wa |
wln |
Wallon |
2002-01-29 |
Add |
roa |
| li |
lim |
Limburgish |
2002-08-02 |
Add |
gem |
| ii |
iii |
Sichuan Yi |
2002-10-14 |
Add |
| an |
arg |
Aragonese |
2002-12-23 |
Add |
roa |
| ht |
hat |
Haitian Creole |
2003-02-26 |
Add |
cpf |
There is no specification on treatment of macrolanguages (see ISO 639-3).
See also
External links
The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1 under GFDL
