ISO 639-1:2002, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages—Part 1: Alpha-2 code'', is the first part of the ISO 639 series of

international standards international standard is a technical standard developed by one or more international standards organization, standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide. The most prominent such organization ...

for

language code A language code is a code that assigns letters or numbers as identifiers or classifiers for languages. These codes may be used to organize library collections or presentations of data, to choose the correct localizations and translations in comput ...

s. Part 1 covers the registration of two-letter codes. There are 183 two-letter codes registered as of June 2021. The registered codes cover the world's major languages. These codes are a useful international and formal shorthand for indicating languages. Many multilingual web sites—such as Wikipedia—use these codes to prefix URLs of specific language versions of their web sites: for example, en.Wikipedia.org is the English version of Wikipedia. See also

IETF language tag An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the su ...

. (Two-letter country-specific top-level-domain code suffixes are often different from these language-tag prefixes). 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

s, introduced in RFC 1766 in March 1995, and continued by RFC 3066 from January 2001 and RFC 4646 from September 2006. The current version i
RFC 5646
from September 2009.

Infoterm The International Information Centre for Terminology (Infoterm) was founded in 1971 by UNESCO. Its goal is "to support and co-ordinate international co-operation in the field of terminology."

(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 ISO 639- 2:1998, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code'', is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. The three-letter codes given for ea ...

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.ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee - Working principles for ISO 639 maintenance
/ref> 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. There is no specification on treatment of macrolanguages (see ISO 639-3).

References

External links

ISO 639

ISO 639-1/RA

{{DEFAULTSORT:Iso 639-1 ISO 639 Language identifiers