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 Technical Committee 37, Subcommittee 2, and first published on May 15, 2008. It is part of the ISO 639 series of standards.

Collective codes
ISO 639-5 defines alpha-3 (3-letter) codes, called "collective codes," that identify language families and groups. As of August 29, 2008 update to ISO 639-5, the standard defined 114 collective codes. The United States Library of Congress maintains the list of Alpha-3 codes that comprise ISO 639-5.

The standard does not cover all language families used by linguists. The languages covered by a group code need not be linguistically related, but may have a geographic relation, or category relation (such as Creoles).

The only site which has a complete list of codes for all language families and groups is the Multitree Site The MultiTree Project, run by the LINGUIST list The LINGUIST List. But these codes are not part of the ISO system, and use four (not three) letters. Since they are clearly distinct from language codes, some sites prefer them, though they are not a standard.

Relationship to other parts of ISO 639
Some of the codes in ISO 639-5 codes are also found in the ISO 639-2 "Alpha-3 code" standard. ISO 639-2 contains codes for some individual languages, some ISO 639 macrolanguage codes, and some collective codes; any code found in ISO 639-2 is also found in either ISO 639-3 or ISO 639-5.

Languages, families, or group codes in ISO 639-2 can be of type "group" (g) or "remainder group" (r). A "group" consists of several related languages; a "remainder group" is a group of several related languages from which some specific languages have been excluded. However, in ISO 639-5, the "remainder groups" do not exclude any languages. Because ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-5 use the same Alpha-3 codes, but do not always refer to the same list of languages for any given code, the languages an Alpha-3 code refers to can't be determined unless it is known whether the code is used in the context of ISO 639-2 or ISO 639-5.

History
The committee draft of ISO 639-5 was issued on February 23, 2005. Voting on the draft terminated on July 5, 2005; the draft was approved.

In 2006, the target publication date for the final standard was set at October 30, 2007. During the approval stage for the standard, the ISO final draft international standard ballot was not initiated until February 8, 2008. Voting ended on April 10, 2008 ("stage 50.60").

The standard was published on May 15, 2008.

An update was published on August 29, 2008.

Problems
Unfortunately, the ISO 639-5 code-set represents a very tiny proportion of the language groupings in the world, as can be seen by comparing it to those in use at the MultiTree site, which come much closer to completeness.

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