ISO 639-6, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 6: Alpha-4 code for comprehensive coverage of language variants'', was a proposed international standard in the
ISO 639
ISO 639 is a international standard, standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) concerned with representation of languages and language groups.
It currently consists of four sets (1-3, 5) of code, named after each part w ...
series, developed by ISO/TC 37/SC 2. It contained four-letter codes that denote variants of languages and language families. This allowed one to differentiate between, for example, historical (
glvx) versus revived (
rvmx)
Manx, while
ISO 639-3
ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for ...
only includes
glv for Manx.
The data supporting ISO 639-6 was researched and compiled by the ISO's registration authority GeoLang. ISO 639-6 was published on 17November 2009, and withdrawn on 25November 2014 because of concerns about its usefulness and maintainability.
The database also links each language and family to its principal ancestor, allowing the user to follow the classification of various languages. For example, the codes and ancestry of
English is given below:
The database differentiated between different scripts used for the same language. For example, a number of different scripts were used in the
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire (), also called the Turkish Empire, was an empire, imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Centr ...
and as a result the
Ottoman Turkish language
Ottoman Turkish (, ; ) was the standardized register (sociolinguistics), register of the Turkish language in the Ottoman Empire (14th to 20th centuries CE). It borrowed extensively, in all aspects, from Arabic and Persian language, Persian. It ...
has been categorized as follows:
See also
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List of ISO 639-6 codes
This is a partial list of 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 correc ...
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ISO 639-5
ISO 639-5:2008 "Codes for the representation of names of languages—Part 5: Alpha-3 code for language families and groups" is an international standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It was developed by ISO ...
: 3-letter codes for language families and groups ("remainder" groups from legacy ISO 639-2 were extended inclusively in ISO 639-5).
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ISO 15924: 4-letter codes for the representation of names of scripts (most of them also used in BCP 47 as "script subtags").
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IETF language tag
An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code that is used to identify human languages on the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the subtags ...
: 5-to-8-letter codes used as "variant subtags", assigned and maintained in the IANA database for BCP 47 language tags.
References
ISO 639
2009 introductions
Language identifiers
{{Lang-stub