ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. It extends the alpha-3 code in ISO 639-2 with an aim to cover all known languages. It is, therefore, a superset of ISO 639-1 and of the individual languages in ISO 639-2. Part 2 also includes language collections, whereas Part 3 does not, so 639-3 is not a superset of 639-2.

The draft from 2005-07-30 contains 7602 entries. The inventory of languages is based on three sources: the individual languages contained in 639-2 are the basis, this was extended by modern languages from the Ethnologue 15th edition, and by historic varieties, ancient languages and artificial languages from the Linguist List.

The status of this project from January 2005 is that of Draft International Standard (DIS). The current draft is referred to as ISO/DIS 639-3.

Code space

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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 (2), a reserved range (520) and B-only codes (23), 545 codes cannot be used in part 3. Therefore a lower upper bound is 17576 - 545 = 17032.

The upper bound gets even lower if one substracts the language collections defined in 639-2.

Macrolanguages

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There are 56 languages in ISO 639-2 which the SIL considers to be “macrolanguages” in 639-3 ^*.

Some of these macrolanguages had no individual language as defined by 639-3 in ISO 639-2, e.g. 'ara'. Others like nor had their two individual parts (nno,nob) already in 639-2.

That means some languages (e.g. 'arb') 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.

For example,

• http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ara (Generic Arabic, 639-2)
• http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=arb (Standard Arabic, 639-3)

See http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/macrolanguages.asp for the complete list.

Collective languages

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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.

Collective languages and their ISO 639-2 codes are:

• not obviously a collective in 639-2:
  • Banda (bad)
  • Bihari (bih)
  • Batak (btk)
  • Dayak (day)
  • Himachali (him)
  • Ijo (ijo)
  • Karen (kar)
  • Kru (kro)
  • Nahuatl (nah)
  • Songhai (son)
  • Zande (znd)
• obviously intentending to cover several languages:
  • Artificial languages (art)
  • Afro-Asiatic (Other) (afa)
  • Altaic (other) (tut)
  • Romance (other) (roa)
  • Niger-Kordofanian (Other) (nic)
  • ...

For definition of macrolanguages and collective languages see http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/scope.asp

See also

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• ISO 639
• List of ISO 639-3 codes

External links

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• ISO/DIS 639-3 Registration Authority
• Linguist List - List of Ancient and Extinct Languages
• explanation by Håvard Hjulstad

ISO standards | ISO 639

ISO 639-3 | ISO 639-3 | ISO 639-3 | ISO 639-3 | ISO 639-3 | ISO 639-3